The Playwright's Manifesto (Book)
The Playwright's Manifesto (Book)
MANIFESTO
i
ii
THE PLAYWRIGHT’S
MANIFESTO
How You Can Be The Future
of Playwriting
Paul Sirett
iii
METHUEN DRAMA
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
Paul Sirett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as author of this work.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility
for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses
given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and
publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites
have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
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To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
iv
For Bert and Stella, Natalie, Joe and Elena.
And for all playwrights – past, present and future.
v
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Preface by Jenny Sealey, MBE x
Prologue 1
PART ONE 5
PART TWO 29
vii
2.8 Think big 141
Epilogue 245
Notes 253
Bibliography 269
Index 275
viii CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
would like to thank all the playwrights, directors, actors and other
theatre people I have worked with and who have inspired me over the
years. A list far too long to include here. My life would have been a
poor thing without you.
I would also like to thank the many students I have had the privilege
of teaching; without them I might never have developed the ideas in this
book. I would particularly like to thank Chloë Lawrence-Taylor, who read
and fed back on drafts and diversions of this book with such acuity and
encouragement. This book would not be this book without Chloë’s
feedback. Thanks are also due to Lucy Davidson, Skye Hallam, Ryan
Leder, Matthew Pettle, Philippa Quinn, Rachel Tookey, Isla van Tricht,
and Charlotte Cromie for conversations during the early development of
this book, and to Anna Connolly-Quirós for her later comments.
I also want to thank my agents, Cathy King and Alex Bloch, and Dom
O’Hanlon at Bloomsbury for commissioning this book and for having
the patience to wait for me while I attempted to come to terms with a
family bereavement. Also, my daughter, Elena Sirett, for her brilliant help
with the research for the chapter Write a Postdramatic Play, along with
Cecil Castellucci, Emma Muir-Smith and John Rwothomack for their
contributions to this book.
Finally, I owe the biggest debt of gratitude and love to my wife, Natalie,
and our children, Joe and Elena. Life with a playwright can be a
complicated thing. Thank you for your love and forbearance.
ix
PREFACE
P
laywriting is hard. So hard. I myself have tried, as I foolishly
thought that the years I have spent working with writers had
seeped into my DNA. The various mantra of plot, structure,
character intentions and emotional arc informed my own process but my
ability to dare to take risks or to dig deep into the psyche of a character
eluded me. To be a playwright you have to be brave and own an ocean of
emotional intelligence, and to dare to pick off the scab, open the can of
worms and lift the lid of the pressure cooker.
As a theatre director I have had the privilege of working with some
extraordinary writers, of whom Paul Sirett is one.
I have a vivid memory of Paul and I being stuck on the logistics of
draft three of Reasons to be Cheerful, our Ian Dury-inspired musical. I
found myself acting out the various roles trying to phantom my own
response to the issue. Paul watched, bemused, safe in the knowledge that
being open and honest with where he was at, was a step in the right
direction of problem solving. He knew what to do, of course he did, he
was the writer.
He just needed space.
I love my conversations with writers and a Graeae conversation has
the added value (challenge) of bringing the aesthetics of access into the
mix. Asking a writer to contemplate audio description becoming part of
a narrative sends alarm bells ringing: ‘Jenny, you need to realise, writers
do not write about what is happening on stage, they write the dialogue of
the characters playing the action.’ My reply is, ‘Try it, see what happens.’
And what has happened has been some glorious plays which have really
embodied access in a proactive, creative, accessible way.
Writing is hugely individual and, as a cohort, playwrights cannot be
pigeon-holed. New plays are the lifeblood of theatre, and a diversity of
voices is an absolute MUST.
This book not only covers what we can learn from past playwrights
and how they can inspire you, but it also asks you to embrace the poet
x
within in you and to think theatrically about how you can tear down that
fourth wall with the story you want to tell.
It is a reminder that, as a writer, you do not have to know everything!
This is where directors and the cast come into play. They can unearth
some of the undiscovered gems that lie within your text. Writing is
notoriously lonely, but it does not have to be. Directors are always there as
a soundboard, but it is worth remembering it is your play, not theirs – this
is note to self! I need to be reminded of my role within the process and be
mindful and sensitive to the nerves of all writers when they deliver a first
draft.
You writers put your soul, wisdom and intellect into your craft and for
that I am truly grateful.
Embrace this book and let the pearls of wisdom propel you forward to
be the writer you want to be and to have the courage to make your voice
heard.
PREFACE xi
xii
PROLOGUE
1
your inspirations and your idiosyncrasies, and to strive to prioritize being
different.
In the second part of this book, I look at the craft of writing for the
stage. Here you will find everything I believe you need to know to write a
well-crafted modern play. Then, I challenge you to do it differently. I argue
for the importance of knowing your craft and then exploding it into a
thousand theatrical pieces because it is vital that we progress. Stand still
and we will ossify. Most books I have read on playwriting written in the
last one hundred years basically do the same thing; they explain how to
create a believable character, who speaks like a real person, in a story
driven by cause and effect. That story, naturally, has a beginning, a middle
and an end, at the conclusion of which, our ‘believable character’ either
does or does not get what they want. They teach us how to write
naturalistic, causal drama. And why not? It is a fantastic formula. It works
beautifully. I will show you how to do that. But there is more, so much
more, to playwriting than this one idea. There is something these
books almost always seem to leave out. They seem to have forgotten
about one vitally important thing: theatricality. This book is a cry for
the theatrical in playwriting. It is also a challenge – a challenge to
write plays that break rules; plays that delight in their use of form,
image and language; plays that paint vivid abstract pictures; plays that are
big in imagination; plays that put the poetic before the prosaic; plays that
engage our imagination and intelligence as well as our emotions; plays
that will be the future of playwriting. This book is a manifesto for the
future of playwriting. And I want to challenge you to be part of that
future.
In the third part of this book, I look at the process of writing, the
nature of collaboration and the importance of coming to terms with the
impact of writing plays on your practical, financial and mental well-
being. Being a playwright is not an easy life. It can be wonderfully
rewarding, but even the most successful playwright must learn to live
with ridicule and self-doubt from time to time. In this section I try to
paint an honest picture of life as a playwright and provide strategies for
dealing with the highs and lows of our chosen profession.
Theatre is a living artform and I believe the time has come for us to fully
comprehend the importance of the work we do. It is time to celebrate
PROLOGUE 3
4
PART ONE
5
6
1.1 WRITE PLAYS
7
to do with being a little bit selfish; the second is to do with making a
meaningful contribution to this thing we call life.
Let’s start by addressing the concern that you should suppress your desire
to write plays to become a lawyer or a doctor instead. Here’s a thought:
why even contemplate becoming a lawyer or a doctor, when, as a
playwright, you can create your own lawyers and doctors who can save the
world from all kinds of tyrants and diseases? And you don’t need to limit
yourself to doctors and lawyers, you can become a king, or a queen, or a
peasant, or a toad, or a dog, or an anthropomorphic chest of drawers. You
can be all the things you ever wanted to be and a whole lot more besides.
You can be a superhero, an anti-hero, a devil, a serial killer, an angel. Who
else gets the chance to slip in and out of skins like these on a daily basis?
And that’s not all, as a playwright, you can live in any period of history
you choose. Want to live during the reign of Henry VIII? Off you go then.
Want to know what it was like in Greece at the time of Plato? Off you go.
How about sampling life during the prohibition era in Chicago? Sure. And
you can change history too. How cool is that? What other job allows you
to change history! Don’t like how that last election turned out? Change it!
If you like, you can save the planet. Or you can save the entire universe.
Or move between parallel universes. Come to that, you can create the
universe. You can be God! Or, if you find that a bit too much, perhaps just
a minor deity. Or perhaps I’m getting a bit carried away and you are just
a mortal who likes to write plays – that’s enough.
When you think about it, a career as a playwright is the opportunity to
invent worlds and explore every career, every occupation, every love, hate,
birth, life and death that has ever happened and that has never happened.
What job could possibly be better than that?
As a playwright, no moment of your life is ever wasted. For instance, the
much-abused receptionist you observe during your two-hour wait at the
dentist might find their way into your next play – as might the storm that blew
the roof off your house or the dream you had about seagulls attacking you.
You can be anyone, be anywhere, and every moment of your life has
the potential for inspiration. Not a bad way to live your life.
WRITE PLAYS 9
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate
way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what
it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theatre derives from
the fact that it is always ‘now’ on the stage.4
Theatre is now. It isn’t a movie that was filmed last year, it isn’t a portrait
that was painted sixty-three years ago, it is now. This moment. The present.
Theatre is the only artform that exists, with us, in the present because it is
the present moment, the now, as art. And that’s not all. Every production
of a play is a new, living, breathing, changing thing, alive for a moment in
time, to be reborn another day in an entirely new representation. Every
production of a play is the play reborn. No other artwork can be
regenerated this way. A play is a perpetual Lazarus. A play that you write
today records the world you live in today, even if it is not about today. It
is a document of your time. A measure of your time. Your message to the
future. A message that can be revisited and reinterpreted for the time in
which it is later produced. A play that you write today has the potential to
speak to thousands of people in a multitude of ways over millennia, it is
a work of art that can exist time and time again in innumerable
manifestations with a multiplicity of collaborators over generations. No
other artform is so versatile. No other artform offers living, breathing
immortality.
Playwriting is a living art through which we glimpse the meaning and
ephemera of existence. Before the players perform their play in the court
at Elsinore, Hamlet tells them that ‘the purpose of playing . . . was and is
to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature’.5 Claudius and Gertrude literally
see themselves reflected in the performance of the players, but the mirror
doesn’t always need to be literal. Sometimes just catching a tiny glimpse
of a reflected half-image is enough. And if you don’t like the idea of
simply reflecting the world we live in, perhaps you can take inspiration
from Bertolt Brecht, who allegedly said we should take a hammer to it to
re-shape it instead.6 Not only can you reflect the world, but you can also
shape it into a better place. We have the power to write and respond now.
Because theatre is now. Playwrights have the power to advocate for
change. So, what’s it to be, the mirror or the hammer? You can reflect what
you see, or you can smash it all to pieces and reshape it. It’s up to you.
And there’s more, so much more. A play is the most primal form of
living human expression. It speaks to who we are. It speaks to what we are.
If you want to be a playwright and you are willing to work hard at getting
better at it, you should do it. I think it is better to live by doing what you
love to do, than it is by forcing yourself into a profession in which you will
never be able to say and do all the things you want to say and do – the
kind of things you can say and do in a play.
If you think you would make a better doctor or lawyer than a
playwright, become a doctor or a lawyer. But if you think you might
prefer to be a playwright, pursue it with everything you have got, and if
you are still worried, write a wonderful play about a doctor or a lawyer to
inspire someone to do the work that you didn’t do (and perhaps might
not have been very good at doing in the first place).
If you have taken the plunge into the depths of playwriting but, one day,
find yourself in the middle an existential crisis and in need of a little
reminder about why you decided to do what you are doing and why it’s
important to keep doing it, at the back of this book you will find over 100
further reasons why becoming a playwright and writing plays is a very good
WRITE PLAYS 11
idea. These are just thoughts I have noted down, and the list certainly isn’t
exhaustive, but it’s a start, and if you ever need a bit of inspiration or
encouragement or comfort, they are there wating for you. Feel free to amend
the list and add more, or, better still, just have a quick glance and then go
and do something really important . . . like write a play.
13
own writing. Inspired by reading these manifestos, I decided to have a go
at writing my own. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
Working out what is at the core of why you write is hard. I borrowed
some ideas from Theatre Workshop and eventually came up with a
bloated statement of several thousand words. What follows is the heavily
edited version:
Writing Manifesto
I will write plays that:
●
are inspired by the stories of ordinary people. Reflect the dreams
and struggles of ordinary people. Appeal and speak to ordinary
people.
● have something to say about the world we live in, the events,
frustrations, problems, inequalities, exploitation, upheavals and
human suffering of today.
● confront people’s fear of difference by placing what is different
about others before them.
● stimulate the desire to build a better world.
●
are humane.
● are engaging.
●
are accessible.
● are entertaining.
● are aesthetically ambitious.
●
are intrinsically theatrical.
Having done this, I now knew what was important to me and I decided
that before I wrote a new play, I would check the importance of writing it
against my list. If the play didn’t match the reason why I wrote plays, I
wouldn’t write it. And that is what I have done ever since. It’s not always
good for the bank balance, but it’s good for the soul.
Most playwrights don’t sit down to work out their manifesto before
they start to write plays. Many don’t even realize there are specific things
that are important to them in their work until an academic or a critic or
their Wikipedia page points it out to them. I once found a much more
19
myself, who’s getting loads of work and I alighted upon James Graham
(author of This House)2 and Peter Morgan (author of The Audience).3 It
seemed to me that both these writers were doing incredibly well, so I
asked myself what I could learn from them. They were writing naturalistic,
intelligent, witty, political plays. So, it seemed to me, the obvious thing to
do was to write a naturalistic, intelligent, witty, political play. Right?
Wrong. Firstly, it’s really hard to write plays like this. Secondly, it just isn’t
how I write. I like to write politically engaged, entertaining theatrical
adventures, usually with songs, not the fraught inner machinations of
political intrigue. After months of intense playwriting pain, I finally gave
up trying to be them and got back to being me.
I needed to remind myself who I was and how I wrote. I rarely write
fourth wall naturalistic drama, and even when I do, I tend to put songs in
the production to serve as a musical metaphor and remind the
audience that we are in a theatre having a live experience. I like to play
with the relationship between the audience and the actors. I like to
gently – and not so gently – position my socio-political point of view.
I like to have a bit of fun. I like to say serious things with a wicked grin
on my face. Because this is who I am. Music and theatricality are at
my core. I left school to play in a punk band. I went back to school so
that I could get the exams I needed to go to university to study drama.
I left university to play in a band. I got kicked out of the band and
decided to get a proper job – writing plays. This is who I am. I love
writing the kind of plays I never got to see when I was growing up
because no one was writing them – or if they were, I didn’t know about
them.
I’m an odd mixture of things, and it is these oddities that constitute my
0.19 per cent. My challenge to you, is to tap into your 0.19 per cent. How
do you go about doing that? Easy. Just be you. It sounds easy, but it isn’t.
Because finding that 0.19 per cent is about taking risks. It is about stepping
out of your 99.81 per cent comfort zone and exposing your 0.19 per cent
of difference. Your 0.19 per cent comprises the voices in your head, your
emotions, your opinions, the strange things you think and dream that
you don’t usually tell anyone about. Your 0.19 per cent is the way your
mind works. Because only your mind works in the way it works. Only you
have lived the life you have lived. Only you have experienced the things
that you have experienced in the way that you have experienced them.
Only you sequence words and ideas in the way that you do. Are you ready
to step beyond craft and expose that?
23
about letting them teach us. I firmly believe that we send valentines all the
time in our work, sometimes we know we are doing it, sometimes we
don’t. But we all do it. Me. Paula Vogel. And you. Admit it.
In a letter to his friend, the scientist, Robert Hooke in 1675, Sir Isaac
Newton wrote: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the sholders
(sic) of giants.’8 Newton acknowledges that he owes a debt to the
achievements of scientists that came before him. Similarly, I believe, we
should not be afraid to admit that we are inspired by the work of other
playwrights. Isn’t this what got us writing plays in the first place? Didn’t
we all see and read plays that made us think, I’d like to do that! Don’t we
continue to see and read plays that inspire us? The question for us is what
do we do with these inspirations? Many of us begin by trying to write like
the writers we admire, we want to be them, so we try to write like them.
But we soon learn that pastiche-Pinter isn’t going to get us anywhere. We
need to take our influences and marry them with who we are as writers.
The point is to be inspired and take this inspiration somewhere new. But
how do we do this? Do we borrow? Do we steal?
You may have heard the variously paraphrased maxim, good writers
borrow, great writers steal. But what does this mean? Where does it come
from? If you google this quote, you are likely to see it attached to the
name of the poet and playwright, T. S. Eliot. So, is Eliot advocating that we
plagiarize another writer’s work? Not at all. Eliot’s original quote is far
more interesting than any of the paraphrased versions. Discussing the
indebtedness of the dramatic poet to their predecessors, Eliot wrote:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what
they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least
something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of
feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was
torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A
good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in
language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca;
Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne.9
Good dramatic poets like Chapman and Shakespeare took what inspired
them and made it into something better. Most importantly, they made it
‘unique . . . utterly different from that from which it was torn.’ If we want
to become better playwrights, one of the best places to start is with the
work of the playwrights we admire. And, if we are to take the advice of
29
30
2.1 IT ISN’T
NATURAL(ISM)
My eureka I want to do that! moment came in the late 1970s when I was
a teenager and went to see the production of a short play one lunchtime
at the Oxford Playhouse. The play was called Jetty and it was about a
group of teenagers hanging around on a jetty by a river (or it might have
been a lake or the sea, I can’t remember). I don’t recall the name of the
playwright, but I do remember that it was a naturalistic play about young
people doing the things that young people do – experimenting with love,
sex, cigarettes, alcohol. I had no idea that there were plays about people
like me that could speak so directly to me. And right there and then, I
thought, I want to do that!
Although this naturalistic play fired my desire to write, the first play
that I ever finished was a bizarre, and truly awful, non-naturalistic
adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s book Titus Alone – I was going through a
Gormenghast / Lord of the Rings phase at the time. Over the years I have
written a handful of naturalistic plays, but instinctively, I always lean
more in the direction of non-naturalistic drama. Don’t get me wrong, I
love an intense, naturalistic play, especially in a small studio space.
However, I think it is important to remember that naturalism is just one
of a multitude of devices that a playwright has at their disposal. And it has
many dynamic theatrical applications.
First things first: let’s get the difference between realism and naturalism
out of the way.
Realism came first. Realism was a reaction against late eighteenth-,
early nineteenth-century romanticism driven by revolution, new
technology and new ideas like the positivist philosophy of Auguste
Comte.1 Naturalism evolved from realism due, at least in part, to Charles
Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, which offered a scientific
view of the natural world.2 Realism explores real people in real situations.
31
Naturalism explores real people in real situations through a scientific
lens. Basically, naturalism, is a more systematic, methodical form of
realism. Okay? No? You disagree! I don’t care. The fact is that for about the
last century and a half the two terms have been interchangeable, and
we’ve got far more important things to do than debate the terminology of
these words – like write the plays that will define the next great movement
in playwriting after naturalism. So, for the sake of this book, I am going to
refer to writing that seeks to represent real speech and real actions in real
time by real people as realistically as possible, as naturalism.
Naturalism has been the predominant dramatic form since the early
twentieth century, sure there have been diversions, into Symbolism and
Surrealism and Epic and Absurdism and other genres, but naturalism
ploughs on regardless. Before the positivist philosophy of Comte and
Darwin’s theory of evolution inspired a generation of playwrights to put
naturalism at the centre of their practice there were over two thousand
years of non-naturalistic drama. For Emile Zola, naturalism was a new and
exciting, ground-breaking form3; and, in the hands of Zola and his
contemporaries – Ibsen, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, Stanislavski,
Shaw, Granville-Barker and others – it became the most exciting genre in
the playwright’s theatrical orbit. The advent of film and television took the
form to even greater heights. Naturalism is wonderful. It came from a
revolutionary moment in scientific, artistic and theatrical thinking and
never ceases to delight. My worry is that there seems to be a disproportionate
emphasis on teaching a naturalistic approach to playwriting without
exploring the rich potential of complementary theatrical modes of writing.
By all means, write beautifully naturalistic plays framed in beautiful
naturalistic sets, all I ask is that you remember that naturalism is versatile
– it can exit alongside and within all kinds of theatrical forms and genres
as well as within realistic, representational worlds.
Naturalism works because it is the fastest and most effective way of
recognizing ourselves on stage. Here’s a character doing the ironing – I’ve
done the ironing. Here’s a character reading a book – I’ve read a book. Here’s
a character eating his own children in a pie – oh . . . maybe not that one . . .
If you want to write a ‘real people, real kitchen, real cooking, linear,
real-time’ play, good for you, but it is possible to write naturalistically and
be aesthetically non-naturalistic at the same time. I think every now and
then you should challenge yourself to find a way to take naturalism to
another – more theatrical – level.
How?
IT ISN’T NATURAL(ISM) 33
writing takes is not. For example, Anatomy of a Suicide contains
naturalistic dialogue, but the language overlaps, repeats, and is spoken in
sync in three separate strands.6 Her language is heightened – her word
choice is carefully constructed to appear naturalistic but on closer
examination will reveal a strong poetic sensibility within a non-
naturalistic structure – it has a distinctive and poetic rhythm. There is a
veil of naturalism behind which is a beautiful world of theatricality and
exquisite language.
Perhaps we have come full circle, perhaps we do have dramatic poets
today, just as they did in Ancient Greece, but we’re frightened to call them
that? It doesn’t really matter, what does matter is that these writers
transcend naturalism by writing in a way that elevates everyday language
to the poetic.
We can’t all write as beautifully as Alice Birch, but we can challenge
ourselves to elevate our language and use naturalism in tandem with
other, more theatrical ideas. Naturalism is here to stay. But we need to
remember that naturalism is only one of a multitude of theatrical tools
available to a playwright. The question for you is, what are you going to
do with it?
Perhaps the easiest way to rupture naturalism is to break the fourth
wall . . .
35
generations by invisibly bricking up the proscenium arch of the Moscow
Arts Theatre to present the plays of Anton Chekhov.
Today, the fourth wall is ubiquitous; it is one of our most commonly
accepted theatrical conventions. It doesn’t need to be built on a
proscenium stage, constructed between the footlights and the stuccoed
cherubs at the top of the proscenium arch, it can just as easily exist
between the audience and the performance area in a studio, or shape-
shift between actor and audience member in a non-traditional space. It
might be there, like a protruding tongue on a thrust stage, or like a tunnel
in a traverse configuration, or even like one long circular wrap of invisible
clingfilm for a play performed in-the-round.
Yet, no matter where or what it is, the thesis remains the same: it is
unseen, it is as if we, the audience, can see through it, but the actor cannot.
The actors know the fourth wall is there, but they ignore it, and the
audience is more than content to play along, willingly engaging in the
suspension of disbelief in order to spy on the lives of the characters. It is
audience as voyeur, audience as Peeping Tom. It is the transparent
membrane between the private world of the characters and the public
space of the auditorium.
We should perhaps remind ourselves that the idea of the fourth wall
was a revolutionary innovation. In earlier forms of drama, there was no
wall between actors and audience, the event itself was the world of the
play. But today we seem to prefer to snoop on other worlds for a couple of
hours, rather than see ourselves as part of the performance. In my
experience, the majority of playwrights write with the fourth wall already
securely built between their imagination and their text. I think the fourth
wall was/is a brilliant idea, but it is only one of many brilliant ideas
developed by theatre-makers over hundreds of years and it seems to me
a great pity that we have become so obsessed with this device when there
are a wealth of ideas and techniques that could potentially enrich our
plays if playwrights would only take the time to remove a few bricks from
the wall now and then.
In order to begin demolition, playwrights might start by asking one
very simple question: why are we obsessed with pretending that the play
we are watching on the stage in front of us is real? It isn’t. It is a lie. It is a
chimera, an invention, a figment of the playwright’s imagination brought
to life by the creative team, the actors, technicians and stage management,
who have been working together to deceive us. It is a falsehood perpetrated
by actors pretending to be hypothetical people doing things that a
The Prologue
How about starting your next play with a prologue? You know the form:
an actor comes on stage, welcomes the audience, and tells them about the
play they are about to watch. Why not? The Greeks did it, the Romans did
it, the Elizabethans did it. Today, very few playwrights seem to bother. It’s
a shame. A prologue is a great way to get all that cumbersome exposition
out of the way. Just tell us what we need to know and get on with it.
In Greek tragedy, the prologue (prologos) is there to provide the
audience with the information it needs to jump straight into the action of
the play. It might be done by direct address, or it might be done with
dialogue, but the purpose is the same – to focus the story as quickly and
simply as possible. Why bother with all that painstaking exposition when
you can just tell the audience what happened before the events of the play
they are about to see performed?
It was a technique not lost on our medieval predecessors. Subtle
exposition buried in realistic dialogue was never going to be much use in
getting the attention of an audience standing in the Market Square more
The Induction
Question: what’s the difference between a prologue and an induction?
Answer: Not a lot. Inductions were a feature of plays written during the
English Renaissance, usually a scene of some kind to set up the action of
the play, or perhaps to comment on it, or to summarize it in some way.
The prologue to An Octoroon is probably more of an induction than it is
a prologue, but let’s not waste time getting hung up on dramaturgical
terms, the important thing is the job these things do.
My favourite induction is the glorious opening that Ben Jonson
penned for his sprawling comedy about Jacobean London, Bartholomew
Fair. It is a wonderful example of metatheatrical hijinks. It begins with the
company’s stage-keeper (stage manager) coming on stage and apologizing
for the late running of the play due to a problem with one of the actor’s
costumes. He then goes on in hushed tones to confide to the audience
that not only does he not like the play very much, but he also thinks the
playwright doesn’t know what he’s writing about and that the playwright
kicked him when he made suggestions for re-writes! He then goes on to
tell the audience about some of his ideas for how the play could be
improved before being interrupted by the book-holder (a kind of theatre
administrator) and the scrivener (a legal clerk). The book-holder tells the
stage-keeper to get off and informs the audience that he has been sent on
in place of a prologue with the scrivener and a contract the playwright
has had drawn up between himself and the audience. He then asks the
scrivener to read out the contract: first, the audience have to agree to
remain in their places for two and a half hours or more; they are not to
The Chorus
The Greeks. Where would we be without the Greeks? And surely one of
the greatest gifts bestowed upon us by Greek civilisation is the gift of the
drama. From the Dithyramb to Thespis to the City Dionysia. From tragedy
to comedy to satyr play. Such a rich store of theatricality. There was no
fourth wall in Greek theatre, the audience sat in a semi-circle around the
orchestra (the circular area where the chorus perform) in broad daylight,
watching the performers; watching each other. Yes, there would be a
visceral connection with the story and the characters, but no one in the
audience was pretending this was really happening in real life. It was
heightened, it was unapologetically theatrical.
The Greek chorus began life as dancers. Over time their role changed,
they started to speak, to comment on events, as well as dance. It is a
beautiful idea. A group of performers represent the general population of
The Aside
The aside was beloved of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is a
beautifully simple device: a character turns to the audience and confides
in them, a brief word in their ear a confidence, a little nod, a wink, an
acknowledgement that we are all (audience and actors) in this together.
We are friends, or, if the character is an unpleasant one, perhaps just
acquaintances.
In Greek drama, it is the chorus who do this job, turning to the
audience every now and then to pass judgement on events, but by the
time of Shakespeare, the aside had become the province of the single
actor.
An aside is usually a brief, passing remark, or a thought spoken out
loud, sometimes made by lead characters, sometimes made by minor
characters. Simple. Glorious. Effortless in its theatricality.
Hamlet turns to the audience early in Shakespeare’s great tragedy to
tell us what he thinks of his usurping uncle, Claudius:
Hamlet (aside.) A little more than kin, and less than kind.24
The Soliloquy
The soliloquy is like the aside’s bigger, more intense, darker sibling. It is
often an inner meditation or contemplation, articulated for all the world
to hear. Sometimes an actor might address a soliloquy directly to the
audience, other times, they may choose to simply articulate the speech
to the middle distance. It doesn’t matter which (to the playwright, at
least). The Soliloquy lets us into the mind of the character without having
to pay homage to the gods of exposition and sub-text. To a playwright, it
is a gift.
Monologue
A monologue is usually a one-person play in which an actor plays single
or multiple roles. It differs from the soliloquy in that it is more often
a direct conversation with the audience, less inner-thought, more
conversational, more storytelling. The actor might simply walk on stage
and tell the audience their story, or perhaps they might tell their story to
an unseen character (or characters), or perhaps address something that
symbolically suggests another person (such as a gravestone).
I used to be a bit of a pedant about monologues. I would ask: who are
they speaking to? Where are they? Why are they telling this story now?
All very irritating. I don’t bother anymore. Who cares? I just want to be
told a story.
Seriously: who doesn’t like to be told a story? Who doesn’t like to listen
to a great storyteller? That wonderful warm feeling we get when a good
story begins, and the storyteller takes us on a journey to who knows
where. That primal, around the fire after a day of hunting (work) and
gathering (shopping) moment when someone starts to tell us a story.
There is the potential for great dynamism within a monologue, not
just in the depth of the character portrayed, but in the glorious versatility
of the actor who can, within a monologue, dive in and out of a variety of
roles. A monologue doesn’t have to be just one voice, an actor can slip in
and out of a whole host of characters – male, female, animal, alien, tree,
cardboard box, wherever the imagination might take you.
Or perhaps you might prefer to write a play with sequential
monologues? One of the prime examples of this form is Brian Friel’s play
Faith Healer – four monologues telling the same story, spoken sequentially
by three characters with the first and last monologue spoken by the same
character.30 It is an engrossing play.
Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donohoe’s Every Brilliant Thing is an
excellent interactive monologue replete with audience participation.31
Direct Address
Direct address infuses many of the devices discussed so far, but it is also
worth looking at on its own.
I run a lot of writers’ workshops for new writers, and I usually find
myself confronted with a barrage of naturalistic plays. I have a theory for
why this is, it goes something like this: most people grow up with
television and film as their main source of drama, the vast majority of
television and film drama is naturalistic, even those of us who are taken
to the theatre are more likely to see a naturalistic drama than any other
type of play, ergo, when someone sits down to write a play for the first
time, they write a naturalistic play. To put it simply, they have very little
experience and knowledge of theatricality, even if they come from a
theatre-going family they are still likely have seen more soap opera than
Shakespeare. The first question I often find myself prompted to ask when
confronted with a new writer’s naturalistic play is: why does this play
demand to be produced on the stage rather than in another medium like
television, radio or film? And then I might ask: would this play benefit
from breaking the fourth wall? And, so, the conversation begins: What is
the fourth wall? How do I break it?
There’s a wonderfully simple thing a new writer can do to experiment
with theatricality in the form of breaking the fourth wall, and that is
Direct Address. Just get your characters to turn to the audience and talk to
Audience participation . . .
. . . two words that are almost guaranteed to induce fear in the heart of
almost every theatregoer. Audience participation. Shrink into your seat!
Look away! Pray that they won’t choose you! We need to talk about this . . .
Exposed
I have always liked plays in which the mechanics and surroundings of the
stage are visible – the lights, the ropes, the fire hydrants, the exhausted
brick walls. I also like plays that not only don’t seek to hide their
surroundings but aren’t afraid to address what is happening on stage.
Bare up-stage brick walls are more exciting than hydraulic elephants for
me. An in-play discussion about the play we are watching is about as
exciting as life gets!
In her note at the beginning of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Alice
Birch asks her collaborators to make the off-stage visible to the audience.
She then tells them there shouldn’t be any set and there should be no
props.40 No smoke and mirrors, all she wants is the space and the actors.
Because that is all she needs. That is all any of us need.
Act Four of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play An Octoroon begins with a
dramaturgical discussion between the Playwright (Dion Boucicault – the
The Epilogue
And finally . . .
Have you ever been at a play and been unsure if it has finished? After
an embarrassing pause, someone at the back (usually the director) starts
clapping and we all breathe a sigh of relief and join in. There was no such
problem in Greek drama, the chorus chanted and danced an exode
informing everyone the performance was over. The Elizabethans also had
no problem with knowing how to end their plays – often turning directly
to the audience and telling them, in verse, that the play had finished, and
it was time for them to applaud. Ben Jonson ends his play Volpone with
this address to the audience:
In other words, the play has finished, sorry if there was anything in it
that upset you, if there was you can blame me, if not, clap your hands. A
conclusion, an apology, an instruction. A simple way of defending your
play against criticism and sending your punters home happy.
Shakespeare ends A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Puck’s couplet:
Why are we frightened to tell the audience the play has finished?
Kudos to Jasmine Lee-Jones who pays a brilliant mini-homage to the
epilogue in her play Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner. At the end of
the play, one of the characters (Cleo) turns to her friend (Kara) and
confesses that she’s feeling a little bit paranoid, like she’s being watched, at
that moment, for the first time in the play, they notice the audience. They
then conclude the play with a couplet and a near rhyme instructing the
audience to clap:
And finally . . .
If you absolutely have to build a glass wall between your audience and
the world of your plays, by all means do so, but I challenge you, every now
and then, to tap it lightly with a hammer just to see what might happen.
I was very proud of a moment towards the end of my play Worlds Apart
when I had a character make a selfless gesture that meant another
character could assume his identity and be released from an immigration
holding facility. It was the best thing that could possibly happen. My
coup de théâtre, however, came when this deceit was uncovered, and the
wrongly released character was forced to return to the holding facility.
The best thing that could possibly have happened had turned into the
worst thing that could possibly have happened. How smart was I for
coming up with a twist like that! Not very, is the answer. I learned soon
afterwards that Aristotle had identified this technique almost two and a
half thousand years earlier and had even given it a name – peripeteia – a
structural device meaning a reversal of fortune from good to bad, or bad
to good. So much for my powers of innovation.
I clearly still had a lot to learn about dramatic structure so I decided it
would be a good idea to study what other writers and theorists had
written about it. I always want to try something new, something different,
but I also think that before you can do anything (r)evolutionary, it’s a
good idea to know how people have done it before you. You have to learn
it to burn it down and then build it up again. The Greek tragedians did.
Shakespeare did. Kane did. The more adventurous writers of recent years
like Crimp and Vogel and Birch are continuing to do so. The problem
is that old theories die hard. And when it comes to dramatic structure,
there is a prescribed way of creating a plot that is ingrained so deeply
it is hard to subvert it. And for good reason: it works! But the problem
is that if we continue to use the same formulaic plots repeatedly
59
without ever trying anything new, we run the risk of our work becoming
stale. We need to learn the prevailing structural wisdom, and then ask
if we can do something different, because, ultimately, dramatic structure
is not a scientific law, it is a way of creating a shape for the story we
want to tell, and there are as many ways to structure a story as there are
stories.
Beginning-Middle-End
The extraordinary polymath Aristotle informs us that in tragedy, plot is
of the first importance.1 Everything else is subservient to plot. And every
plot must have a beginning, a middle and an end.2 Not only that, but the
incidents in a tragedy must be placed in a precise causal order so that if
any one of them is moved or omitted, the play will cease to function.3
Aristotle’s diktat works. It works brilliantly and he did playwrights a
great service in identifying the six elements of tragedy as he did – Plot,
Character, Thought, Diction, Music, Spectacle, in the order – but to
slavishly continue to adhere to his principles when there are so many
other options available seems to me a missed opportunity.
However, we can’t really move on from Aristotle until we understand
his ideas and those of his subsequent apostles. So, let’s begin with what
you need to know about plot according to Aristotle and take it from there.
What follows is a brief history of Beginning-Middle-End cause and effect
structure over the past two and a half thousand years.
Around 330 bce Aristotle wrote what were probably a series of lecture
notes called Poetics. This short book has had an extraordinary influence
on playwriting. In the book, Aristotle uses Oedipus Rex by Sophocles as
the template for writing a great tragedy. He felt that this play was the best
example of what he called a Complex Plot. For Aristotle there were two
distinct types of plots, the Simple Plot – in which a unified series of
actions is accompanied by a change in fortune, and the Complex Plot – in
which the actions lead to a change of fortune which is then met with a
reversal of fortune and recognition.4 If we break Oedipus Rex down, the
causal, complex Beginning-Middle-End beats of the plot look like this:
Also known as the Inciting Incident – the incident that sets the story in
motion. The Inciting Incident in Oedipus Rex is Oedipus deciding to
solve the mystery of who killed Laius; the Inciting Incident in Hamlet is
the ghost telling his son to avenge him; the Inciting Incident in West Side
Story is Tony and Maria falling in love at first sight. It is the moment
that tells the audience why this story has to be told.
Middle
● Something gets in the way of solving the problem – an
OBSTACLE
● Something exacerbates the attempt to solve the problem – a
COMPLICATION
● There’s an argument, escalating the problem – a
CONFRONTATION
● It gets even more furious – into CONFLICT
● A moment of respite, perhaps things will be okay – some CALM
● Things get complicated again – another COMPLICATION
● The best thing that could possibly happen happens –
REVELATION (Part 1) THE GOOD NEWS
● However – the TWIST
● The best thing that could possibly happen turns out to be the
worst thing that could possibly happen – REVELATION (Part 2)
BAD NEWS
NB. This device is called peripeteia meaning a reversal of
fortune from Good to Bad, or Bad to Good. It is a gem of a
technique. If a director asks you for a TWIST do this.
End
● The fallout from the revelation, things get even worse –
CATASTROPHE
NB. This is the moment when we feel catharsis – a releasing of
all the pent-up fear and pity induced by the story.
● It’s over. Time to tie-up the loose ends – RESOLUTION
Someone wants something, they try to get it, they think they’ve got it, but
they haven’t got it, and their life falls apart. That’s it. That’s all you need to
know. You can now go and write a tragedy. And it will probably be quite
good, because don’t we all love a good beginning, middle and end, driven
by cause and effect? Of course we do. A fact backed up by multiple
manifestations of this simple paradigm over millennia.
Our brains are conditioned from birth to love stories with this kind of
trajectory. It is in the stories we are told as children. But it wasn’t only
Aristotle who got this giant story snowball rolling. Written at some point
between 220 bce and 200 ce, about 3,500 miles away in India, a Sanskrit
treatise on the performing arts, The Nā.tyaśāstra, attributed to the sage,
Bharata Muni, was being put together. This vast book covers a wide range of
dramaturgical techniques including dramatic structure. One of the potential
plots outlined in this treatise uses a metaphor from nature that is not too far
removed from Aristotle: in the Beginning we have the seed, the desire to
attain something; in the Middle we have the opening of the seed, the effort
to attain that something; the sprouting of the seed, the possibility of success;
and a moment of looking away while the seed grows, the certainty of success;
at the End we have full fruit, the thing has been attained, success.5
I have always been particularly fascinated by the inclusion of the moment
of looking away, which would appear to correspond to the moment of calm
in Oedipus Rex, suggesting that a story can benefit from a moment of quiet
reflection before going deeper into the dark heart of the drama.
In fourteenth-century Japan, the actor and playwright, Zeami
Motokiyo identified perhaps the simplest, and most beautiful, natural
Making a Scene
The playwright Steve Waters relates the idea that each scene in a play is
like each cell in a body.8 Inspired by this, I started to think of each scene
If the crux of the scene comes too soon and too much time is spent in the
aftermath the effect may be dissipated and if nothing else happens the
attention of the audience might wander.
If the crux comes too late in a long scene, the audience may have
already switched off and you’ll have a struggle to get them back.
Each scene needs to be managed and controlled to sustain the
audience’s interest and attention. If an audience doesn’t care about what
happens next, you’ve probably lost them.
The crux of each scene, then – the revelation, the conflict, the reversal –
must come at the right moment. Back to play structure – the climax is
probably best coming about two-thirds to seven-eighths of the way through.
As a rule (if there is such a thing) a scene should only be as long as is
necessary to deliver the information it needs to deliver in the context of
the trajectory of the story. However, it is worth bearing in mind that a
short scene on the page may play longer in performance if it contains a
big emotional moment. Similarly, a long scene on the page may play faster
on stage if it is a 100 mph slanging match. And in a very long scene there
may be several cruxes – such as in Chekhov where multiple character
stories may be played out in sequence.
Pace
The question of pace is an interesting one – both in terms of the scene as
a stand-alone unit and within the context of the play as a whole. Scenes of
You should now have a good idea of how to construct a scene, but you
don’t have to write scenes in the way I have outlined. Now that you know
how to do it, you can deliberately experiment with doing it differently. You
don’t even need to call them scenes, you can call them ‘scenarios’ like Martin
Crimp, or use dashes or dots or any other way of delineating scenes that
doesn’t use numbering. In terms of the internal structure of a scene, you can
deliberately try to subvert the Aristotle-in-miniature structure, but be
warned, it isn’t easy! If in doubt, take some inspiration from the great Sarah
Kane and scatter numerals all over the page like she does in 4.48 Psychosis.10
And scenes can be malleable, in The Watsons by Laura Wade, the scenes often
bleed seamlessly into one another – before one scene has finished another
scene has already begun. They are like interlaced fingers, it keeps the pace
fast, attention focussed, and obviates the need for the constant stop-start, up
and down yo-yoing of the lights and shifting of furniture in the blackout.11
But before you can start deconstructing and reconstructing individual
scenes, you need to know how they fit into your overall structure. So, let’s
get back to the big picture and explore some ways to subvert the classic
Aristotelian paradigm.
Comedy (Greek-style)
The structural template for an Aristophanean comedy usually looks
something like this:
Borrowed
A structure taken from another source.
Use the structure of a ballet, or an opera, or a novel, or another artwork
to tell your story. The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez borrows from the
novel Howards End by E.M. Forster. This is a story (theoretically) being
written as we watch, characters appear to be creating the narrative as they
tell it, sometimes they even voice displeasure with the plot. At times E.M.
Forster will tell them something it might be useful for them to know
about writing – such as the fact they every now and then they might want
to change their mind about things as the story progresses. A writer has
choices, even in the performance of a play about a play in a novelistic
form, they still have choices.
Defying expectation
Set it up – then, don’t do it.
A simple idea: subvert expectation. Set up a dramatic trope, then side-
step it. Lead your audience to expect one thing, then give them something
completely different. Show us the cause; then give us an unexpected
effect.
Modern audiences are comprised of legions of smartarses who are
confident they can predict the twists and turns of a plot. And why
wouldn’t they be confident about it, we are fed the same story structure
again and again – Beginning-Middle-End, enemies to lovers; zeroes to
heroes; rags to riches. Consciously (or subconsciously) we have all been
conditioned in the storytelling art of cause and effect. Challenge yourself
to do something different. Give us a cause and then choose an
unpredictable effect.
The wheel
A theme/idea-linked plot.
Think of an old-fashioned wagon wheel – a central hub with spokes.
In Wheel Structure, the hub is the central theme or idea of your play,
the spokes are the scenes, stories, vignettes, that radiate out from this hub.
Your hub might be the theme of sexual exploitation, your spokes the
stories of six or seven victims of sex trafficking; your hub might be the life
of a small American town called Grover’s Corner in Our Town or a Welsh
fishing village called Llareggub in Under Milk Wood,19 your spokes are the
stories of the individual inhabitants. Your hub might be the theme of
envy, your spokes seven thematically, but otherwise unrelated, stories
about the green-eyed monster.
Multiple POV
An event-linked plot
The same event seen from different points of view (or different
versions of the same story).
The story of the disappearance of a child, told from the POV of the
mother, the father, the child, the sister, the teacher, the police officer.
Think: Event – lies, truth and memory.
The daisy-chain
A thing-linked plot.
A plot linked by a thing – an object or single location – rather than the
journey of a single protagonist.
The story of a bicycle (and its four riders); the story of a guitar (and its
five players); the story of a medieval manuscript and its journey to the
present day; the story of a single prison cell and the cell’s chain of
prisoners through the ages. The story of a plot of land and the seductions
Time
We can do extraordinary things with time. We can make time jump, slip
and warp. We can speed it up, slow it down, and make it stop. In Thornton
Wilder’s play, The Long Christmas Dinner,21 ninety years pass in one
continuous scene of forty minutes.
Don’t obsess about real time, use time as symbol, metaphor, action;
distort it, run it backwards like Harold Pinter does in Betrayal.22 Run it
out of sequence, like Caryl Churchill does in Top Girls.23
Ask yourself if linear time is the best way to tell your story. If you can
generate a stronger dramatic impact by running events out of sequence, do
it. Scramble time, buckle time, go forwards and backwards at the same time,
repeat time – repeat the same moment again and again with different results
like Caryl Churchill does in Heart’s Desire, part of Blue Heart (1997).24
Use time to enhance the dynamic of your play.
No conflict
Perceived wisdom: Drama is Conflict.
Challenge perceived wisdom: Try Kishōtenketsu.
Kishōtenketsu usually contains four sections: introduction, development,
twist and conclusion. The story is introduced in the first part, developed in
the second. But there are no major changes until the third section, in which
a surprising element is introduced – this section is the equivalent of the
climax in the Aristotelian paradigm, but different in that it doesn’t obviously
follow on from preceding events. It is left for the fourth section to pull the
strands together, to recontextualize events, to wrap up the story.
Branching
Climb a tree.
A variation on the Meandering Structure is Branching Structure. This
structure consists of a system of branches that extend from a trunk by
adding new branches. Once again, this is more of a novelistic structure
that can be found in books like Game of Thrones (George R. R. Martin). It
also forms a fundamental part of many gaming structures.25
Parallel
This structure has dual or multiple storylines that mirror and reflect each
other.
Stories can include different protagonists or a single protagonist living
different ‘lives’ or the same protagonists in different worlds. Constellations,
by Nick Payne, shows two characters living in parallel manifestations –
brilliantly showing the effects of the choices we make in life (more on this
below – in Science). A play can offer a single character in multiple
personalities – in a play of mine called Lush Life, directed by Max Roberts
and originally produced by Live Theatre in Newcastle in 2008, I had five
actors playing one part.
Think in parallel.
Science
A dramatic structure built from a scientific theory.
Evolution – a play that changes slowly over time.
The Big Bang – a play that expands.
That’s it. That’s all he has to say. Because he doesn’t need to say anything
else. That single line does all the work for him. I can’t imagine a universe
where a playwright could come up with a better note. In the Big Bang of
Twenty-First-Century writer’s notes, Nick is my winner.
Postdramatic structure
Structure after drama. Structure without drama. Structure as chaos.
Structure as individual audience member interpretation. Structure as
whatever it will be according to the performance. More on this in the
chapter 2.10 Write a Postdramatic Play.
When you have alighted upon a new structure, you can begin to think
about how the individual scenes will work within that structure. My
advice is to first identify the beast, then go full Frankenstein and start to
transplant the organs you need to make it function.
And . . .
If you can’t avoid (or resist) a traditional structure, how about doing what
Seneca did and putting a musical interlude between each of the acts?
Seriously. Have you ever been watching a play and noticed that the energy
in the room is beginning to sag? It feels like the momentum has been lost.
There is a simple solution. Put a song in! I’m being serious. If you want to
re-energize your audience, take them to a different place with a different
energy, what better way to do it than with a song. In Golden Age Broadway
musical theatre, they would often insert a blockbuster of a song to wake
the audience up when the energy in the room was sagging. So why
shouldn’t we do it in a play? Paula Vogel wasn’t worried about inserting a
song or two into Indecent. She uses a song to stir the audience after setting
up the world of her play; she uses a song to show the process of immigration
and assimilation; she uses a song interleaved with dialogue to show the
rising tide of genocide. This is a play with performance at its heart, in
which the performers of the play it was inspired by were ultimately banned
from performing plays and were only allowed to perform songs, dances
and skits. But your play doesn’t need to be about a performance troupe for
you to include songs. Shakespeare did it. We are working in the medium of
live performance. Music is live performance. I have sometimes found
myself bored to tears at a new play wishing silently to myself for the
How are contemporary writers using structure? Below are some examples
from a selection of what I believe to be some of the best modern plays.
Dance Nation
In Dance Nation Clare Barron basically uses a classical Aristotelian
complex plot – it is a play about entering a dance competition and like
many sport/competition stories the shape of the story is dictated by
progress in the competition. What is interesting about her structure is the
way that she successfully fuses the narrative (the competition) and the
thematic (the story about growing up). These elements co-exist and
the arc of the old-school competition plot is given a visceral new life in
the way that it simultaneously tells the rights of passage story of the
adolescent characters. Inspired crafts(wo)manship.
An Octoroon
In the original version of The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, each act ends
with a tableau, at the end of the first act of Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ An
Octoroon, the actors attempt a tableau, but then the contemporary
playwright adds a couple of extra (very modern sounding) pages of
Indecent
Time is yours to manipulate on the page. There are no laws. You are in
charge of the temporal universe. As Paula Vogel writes in the introduction
of her wonderful play ‘Indecent’, working with her collaborators helped her
to realize that ‘I could write a tour of Europe in a page.’29 And she does –
almost (in the published script it takes two pages, but the text is generously
The Writer
I was always told that it is essential to establish your contract with the
audience in the first five minutes of your play. In other words, the first few
minutes need to outline the precise nature of the suspension of disbelief
required of your audience to engage with the performance. But you don’t
have to do this. You can set up one type of play and then pull the rug out
completely from under the audience’s feet, like Ella Hickson does in The
Writer. The opening of this play is sublime – a play has just finished; a
young woman and an older man enter and discuss the play they have just
seen. She is a writer; he is a director. In the following scene, the writer and
director of the scene we have just watched (in which they played a slightly
more attractive versions of their ‘real’ selves) enter for an audience Q&A
about the scene we have just watched. What started as one thing has become
something else. What a great metatheatrical twist and how gloriously
disorientating for the audience. And it doesn’t stop there. The Writer is a
complex play about writing, performance, the nature of representation, the
staging of the female experience, confrontation, probability, myth, sex,
sexuality, feminism, and its structure mirrors this complexity. After a
disorientating, metatheatrical first half of the play in which the playwright
sets up the story of a writer and director and actor (boyfriend), she then
takes us somewhere totally unexpected with a provocation – a piece of
direct address storytelling which, in Ella Hickson’s words, ‘should be an
attempt at staging the female experience,’30 complete with photographic
landscapes, drawings, dance and celebration. Weren’t expecting that were
you, director? What are you going to do with it? And after all this, we come
back to the world of the play as it was, with the characters (the writer and
the director) trying to work out how to finish the play they have started.
Knowing how dramatic structure works you can now begin to play with
it. But this is only one part of your dramatic art. You also need to create
characters and get them to talk . . .
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rival plot in importance. Today, it is rare to discuss a play without talking
about the arc of a character. Today, it is often the case that a story is
driven more by how a character changes than it is by plot. Nowadays,
it seems that what happens is less important than what a character
experiences.
Is character more important than plot? That’s for you to decide. But it
doesn’t have to be. As a playwright you have a rich store of options as well
as three-dimensional character development. There are other ways of
creating character. There are other things an actor can do. But you might
struggle to find much written about it in the late twentieth- to early
twenty-first-century crop of ‘How to’ books. I am complicit in this myself.
I went through my teaching notes stretching back many years to find out
what I had to say about characterization and soon discovered that I had
said very little about alternatives to representational characterization and
had been singing from the same character hymn sheet as the vast majority
of other playwrights, dramaturgs and teachers from the last 100 years.
The dominant model in today’s dramaturgy is to create a fully fleshed
out, three-dimensional, true-to-life, consistent representation of an
individual, with fully mapped out inner conflicts, a spider diagram of
intra-personal relationships, and carefully identified extra-personal
worldviews, complete with a full backstory and/or psychological profile
complete with good and bad qualities and idiosyncratic character traits.
They must want and/or need something – a goal or intention or (super)
objective – and undergo change as a result of trying to get it. And all this
before you even start to write your dialogue.
There are a lot of variations and spin-offs from the above advice, but it
usually boils down to believability, wants and change. Reviewing this
information today, I have two questions:
Thesis – you must know everything about your character before you
write!
Antithesis – you don’t need to know anything about your character
before you write!
Synthesis – know a bit and discover the rest as you go . . .
Beyond which approach suits you best, I want to remind you that there
are other options. A character can be an archetype, a character can
be a cypher, a lampshade can be a character. And what happens if
the character the writer has created is interpreted entirely differently
by the actor? Is that a problem or just one of the joyous variables of
collaboration?
To get a better understanding of the many ways in which character
can work on the stage, other than the true-to-life, representational model,
let’s take a look at how playwrights have used character in the past and
what some of the more innovative playwrights are doing today. As ever,
these techniques are there for us to use, abuse and revise with our own
additions. Let’s try to think differently about character. Think laterally.
It all sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it? We might not put the emphasis on
a character being ‘good’ in the same way anymore, but all the other
elements – being appropriate, lifelike, consistent – are basic naturalistic
character requirements. The path from Aristotle’s advocacy of lifelike
characters to the snot and excrement of today’s hyperrealism would seem
to be quite a short one, except, there have been some considerable
deviations from that path and there are some fundamental differences
between the kind of good-appropriate-lifelike-consistent character
Aristotle advocates and the type of character you are likely to find in a
naturalistic play today.
In Aristotle’s day the tragic hero was likely to be an historical-
mythological character, so they weren’t literally likely to be like us, they
would most likely be a virtuous, capable and powerful noble. However,
the character would most definitely be like us in the way that we
associatively feel and suffer their pity and fear. Never underestimate the
power of fear and pity in your audience, it’s what they need! We all need
a good emotional purge from time to time and what better way to do it
than through fear and pity of unmerited misfortune, the two emotions
fundamental to the experience of catharsis – the process of sluicing pent-
up emotions through drama.
Next, you need perhaps the most essential tragic hero character trait:
the fatal flaw or hamartia. This is a tragic human quality, like hubris that
will ultimately lead to your hero’s downfall. And it is as a result of this
fatal flaw that your hero will suffer a reversal of fortune that will lead
them to a new understanding of their predicament.
Stock characters
A stock character is a character that relies heavily on stereotypical traits
that mark them out as a specific character type. Basically, they are an
expositional short-cut relying on cliché and parody. Surely no great
contemporary dramatist would stoop so low as to write a stock character
into their new play, would they? To which I say, why not? Why not have a
two-dimensional stock character in your play? Let your ‘real’ characters
bump up against ‘unreal’ ones. Play with the idea of stock traits. Tease.
Don’t dismiss the idea of stock characters simply because it is not
fashionable, use them to create something new.
Aristophanes gave us boastful imposters, ironic adversaries, and
buffoons with very specific accents, costumes and props. The moment
they appeared, the audience knew who they were and what they
represented. Here comes a character with a truncheon, must be a parasite!
That one’s got a crook, must be a shepherd! That one’s got a sceptre, must
be a royal!
Similarly, a character walks on stage in a Roman comedy by Plautus
and the audience know immediately who that character is; his mask, his
costume, his posture, his gait, tell us immediately that this is an old miser,
a young lover, a cunning slave, a flatterer, a braggart. Nothing needs to be
explained.
And while we are at it, we can change all these male stock characters
for female stock characters.
Alternatively, we can create a whole host of new stock characters for
the twenty-first century. The Influencer. The Populist Politician. The
Conspiracy Theorist.
Then, we should ask ourselves what their mask might look like.
The great thing about a mask (and an easily identifiable costume
for that matter) is that the audience will immediately jump to a
conclusion – and we can play with that, twist it, subvert it. No one would
The satyr
A satyr is a half-beast, half-human, drunk, lustful follower of Dionysus
with a large phallus and, if you’re lucky, a mask with horns! Sadly, you
won’t see a lot of satyrs on the contemporary stage.
The tragedians of ancient Greece weren’t just expected to write
tragedies, they also had to master the art of the satyr play. A satyr play was
a ribald, burlesque of mythology, usually in a bucolic setting served up
after the playwright’s trilogy of tragedies – a moment or puerile filth and
comic relief to send the audience home in high spirits.6 Perhaps we
should consider adding a short play like this to the bill after a searing
modern tragedy? A production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted followed by a ten-
minute slapstick routine replete with custard pies and fart cushions.7 It
might cheer some people up.
There is only one fully extant satyr play – Cyclops by Euripides. It is a
dreadful, misogynistic, fatuous play. I don’t recommend reading it, unless
you need evidence that people were just as puerile two and a half thousand
A one-actor multiplicity
Get one actor to play a cast of thousands. A slight tilt of the head, a cough,
a slouch – it is so simple for a single actor to change character. Write a
play with multiple parts and then, on the title page, write: A Play for One
Actor. Job done.
In Random debbie tucker green has one actor play a family – a sister, a
brother, a mother, a father.9 Having just one actor embody her entire
family spins the centrifugal familial force that drives this play and takes us
deep into the heart-wrenching bereavement at the centre of their story.
Embodying the family in one body, using direct address monologues and
dialogue between characters, all spoken by a single actor, enables a
simultaneous connection and objectivity that allows us to grieve with the
characters and, at the same time, think deeply about the story. A masterclass.
And it can work in other ways, multiple actors can play the same
character at different ages, they can play different versions of the same
character at the same age. And perhaps try enrichening access-led
theatrical solutions like having a D/deaf actor playing the same part as a
hearing actor, thereby creating multiple layers of further interpretation
(more on this in the chapter 2.11 Write Accessibly).
Let’s think harder about the one actor per character paradigm.
Be an animal
And it’s not only furniture that can talk; animals can. Anthropomorphise!
You know you want to!
Or simply make a human character like an animal. Have a quick look
at Ben Jonson’s 1606 city comedy Volpone. In this play the wily, eponymous
Volpone, ‘the Fox’, is helped by his parasitical servant, Mosca, ‘the Fly’, who
buzzes around the ears of the three greedy legacy-hunters, Voltore, ‘the
Vulture’, Corvino, ‘the Crow’, and Corbaccio, ‘the Raven’.
Sometimes a simple animal metaphor will serve your play a lot more
interestingly than knowing your character’s New Year’s resolution was to
give up smoking.
Puppets
Puppets? Yes please! And I don’t just mean puppeteers in black
manipulating a proportionally precise horse puppet. I mean fully fledged
Psychological truth
Several of the most relatable, potent, psychologically complex, multi-
dimensional characters ever created by a playwright talk in blank verse
and rhymed couplets; they engage in punning wordplay and talk directly
to the audience; they use little in the way of props or specific character
costume; and they perform on a stage with little or no set. I am, of course,
referring to the characters created by William Shakespeare.
Modern character
Here’s an interesting question: To what extent should a contemporary
dramatist get involved in casting?
In Clare Barron’s note on casting at the beginning of her play Dance
Nation, she explains that all characters, other than two adult roles,
are between eleven and fourteen years old. However, she asserts that these
adolescent characters should mostly be played by adults ranging in age from
twelve to seventy-five plus. And she goes on to explain why – she wants us to
‘Think of it as a ghost play: the actors’ older bodies are haunting these
13-year-olds characters . . . And these 13-year-old characters are haunted by
the specters of what they will become.’16 What a simple and, at the same time,
beautiful way to express the idea of growing up – adolescent characters
played by the adults they will become. By doing this Clare Barron enables us
to see the present and the future and the past at the same time. And,
importantly, this does nothing to diminish our empathy with these characters,
in fact, it enhances it because we know where they are going. Wonderful.
Dance Nation is a play about young people more than it is a play about
dance, with this in mind Clare Barron also includes a note about dance at
the start of her play, explaining that the presentational essence of dance is
more important than literal dance talent. She follows this up with a
wonderful idea in an audition sequence early on in her play, when she
suggests that the audition pieces are delivered as a ‘ballet of the face’ –
instead of physical leaps and turns, we get facially exaggerated deep
breaths, furrowed brows, open mouths.17 Casting isn’t dependent upon
the ability to dance, it is more important to find actors who can embody
the idea of dance, the actor’s presence is more important than being able
to do the splits – and the audience loses nothing in this choice, in fact,
they are much more likely to see themselves in the characters by this
choice. And all this, at the playwright’s instigation.
Does the age of a character need to be set? Not always. In fact, not
setting a specific age can add a further dynamic to your play. In Paula
Casting yourself
How about putting yourself in your play? I have never been entirely
convinced by navel-gazing plays about being a playwright, but I love it
when writers put versions of themselves in plays about writing the play
we are watching. Gregory Burke does this to great effect in his excellent
play Black Watch by showing a nervous playwright researching his play
about an elite Scottish army infantry battalion.19
Arguably one of the most ambitious plays about a playwright writing
a play is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play An Octoroon – a play about a
playwright writing a play about a play written by another playwright who
is also in the play. In Act Four of this play, the two characters representing
the respective playwrights of the two plays stop to discuss the dramaturgy
of the play they are now appearing in – could life get any more exciting
that this? Not for me it doesn’t! Then, there is the part of Br’er Rabbit, a
character from the oral storytelling traditions of African Americans who
is to be ‘played by the actual playwright, or another artist involved in the
production.’20 Br’er Rabbit is sometimes perceived as a trickster provoking
and bending social norms, in this play the character becomes a trickster
provoking us by bending theatrical norms. Lesson: bend the rules, include
a scene in which you discuss how and why you are bending the rules, and
while you’re at it give yourself a part in your own play. Why not?
There are ten young men sitting around writing at the beginning of
The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez. Perhaps they are all versions of the
playwright? Sometimes, in this play, the young men morph into other
Doubling
And don’t forget to fully exploit the idea of multi-roling – perhaps tie it to
the thematic vision of your play, make a virtue of it. In Paula Vogel’s play
Indecent, a play about a group of itinerant Jewish actors, she has seven
actors playing thirty-six roles – and why wouldn’t she, they are actors
playing actors after all! It is totally in keeping with the vision of the
play – as well as being a pragmatic solution to the potential cost of staging
One of the great playwriting innovators of the last thirty years in British
theatre is Martin Crimp. His plays have been hugely influential on the
more adventurous British playwrights of recent years. In his play Attempts
on her Life, there are no designated characters, the speaker is designated
by a dash ( – ) and it is up to the creative team to decide who speaks
which lines. He also offers the creatives the option of having a character
speak in an African or Eastern European language and, most interestingly
to me, he plays with the idea of blurring the line between actor and
character. He does this in Scene 16 by introducing stage directions
suggesting that the actor may have forgotten her lines and is looking for
a prompt. Later in the scene he informs us that she seems to dry
completely, and, after a moment of confusion, another speaker takes over
her lines. Crimp doesn’t want us to know if this is stage fright or genuine
distress. Subsequently, she tentatively joins back in.24 What is the
implication of this blurring? Does Martin Crimp want us to question the
nature of performance? Does he want to remind us (the audience) that
we are watching a play? Is he playing with the idea of verbatim theatre
and experimenting with verisimilitude? Is this supposed to be a
metaphysical comment on the nature of performance? Is it real? Is it
false? Is this some kind of new performative formulation? Is this
postdramatic text in action? It is up to the director and actors to decide
how they want to interpret this. True collaboration between the playwright
and the interpreters of their work.
These days I read a lot of plays which use a dash ( – ) instead of a
character name, it has become one of the hallmarks of those playwrights
who wish to invite collaboration and set a challenge to the creative teams
making their plays. I also read a lot of plays in which playwrights use a
dash ( – ) instead of a character name for absolutely no good reason
whatsoever – please don’t do it unless it serves your play. A good guide on
when (and when not) to use a dash ( – ) is in Alice Birch’s play Revolt. She
Said. Revolt Again. There is no cast list included with the published text
of this play. In three of the four acts, characters are designated with a dash
( – ) but in Act Two the characters are named. Why? Because in this act
My play Lush Life is about a singer obsessed with Ella Fitzgerald. I wanted
to show the different faces this character presented to the world, so I
divided her up and had five actors playing different aspects of a single
character. I did this because I wanted to play with the different voices of
this one character: her rational voice, her ambitious voice, her romantic
voice, her self-loathing voice, and her angry voice. I also did this to focus
on each voice as and when it became dominant, to juxtapose voices in
unison and repeated patterns of speech, and to fuse them and create a
climactic vocal cacophony when they spoke over each other. Each voice
had subtle differences in vocabulary and articulacy. Choosing the right
words for each voice and playing with the way the voices interacted was
challenging and rewarding. It was the most consciously lyrical way I had
ever written. I ended up thinking in terms of the play being a word
song. I had always known the value of words, but writing this play
really confirmed for me the importance of understanding that language
is our principal tool and that every single word we write needs to be
chosen for weight, balance, rhythm, sound and meaning – language is not
disposable.
There is a surprising lack of focus on the use of language in modern
playwriting books. We should perhaps remind ourselves that we started
out as DRAMATIC POETS. The term ‘playwright’ was originally coined
by the irascible bricklayer’s son Ben Jonson as an insult in the early 1600s.
Jonson modelled himself of the Roman lyrical poet Horace and was not
impressed with those he considered to be mere artisan writers cobbling
together plays for a few shillings. Hence his conflation of the word ‘play’
and the word ‘wright’ – as in shipwright (a maker of ships) or cartwright
103
(a maker of carts). As far as Jonson was concerned, a great writer was a
dramatic poet, not a wright, a mere maker of plays.
What a pity that so many playwrights seem to have forgotten that they
can also be poets. What a pity that so many of us seem to prefer naturalistic
dialogue over dramatic poetry. What a pity that words have become
functional rather than magical.
I think the problem is probably down to our dramaturgical education.
Most contemporary dramatists receive their writing education from
naturalistic television drama. Most TV and film drama uses a regulated
version of broken, stilted, repetitive, tangential everyday speech –
regulated in a way that makes it slightly less messy, so that we can
understand it whilst still playing lip service (pun intended) to the fact
that we don’t speak in perfectly formed sentences, and we sometimes
don’t say what we really mean (sub-text). It is essential for a dramatist to
master these skills and I love a great TV drama but regulated naturalistic
speech isn’t the only way to write dialogue. There are plenty of other
options available to a playwright beyond the representation of everyday
conversation.
Far too many of us seem to have forgotten the versatility and beauty of
words. Worryingly, we seem to have forgotten that it is not just the choice
of words but the sound they make that is central to our writing. We seem
to have forgotten the sensory power of sound – let’s not forget that
language originated in sound. Today, we seem to focus our efforts on how
best to replicate everyday speech without thinking about how we can
elevate language to something new; to something (brace yourself) more
poetic. We have forgotten how to move beyond the literal, to use language
as emotion, as colour, as time, as travel, as violence, as dance, as repression,
as chaos. Language as an abstract device that illuminates a feeling more
brightly than anything directly stated ever can. We seem embarrassed to
think of dialogue as poetic. Why?
I am not suggesting that you need to become an expert in prosody, just
that you need to become acutely aware of the power of words. You do not
need to obsess about the metrical rhythm of a line but to learn to respect
the fact that it will have a rhythm. You need to understand that great
dramatic writing comes from working a bit harder with language – the
use of language, understanding language. Why do people love
Shakespeare? Because we can come back to his plays time and time again
and find new things in them every time. The harder you work to
Rhythm of words
To find the right rhythm of words, Aristotle recommends the use of
iambic verse ‘. . . which as far as possible models itself on speech . . .’1
Back to basics. Forget English Literature, this isn’t about writing essays
it’s about understanding your craft. A lack of knowledge about the way
words work together is like a musician not learning scales – you might get
away with it for a while, but there will come a time when you need to
know it if you are going to take your work to the next level. What is an
iamb? A short unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
● IAMB: di-DUM
Why is this important? Rhythm! Language has a rhythm. You either work
with the rhythm of your language or against it. Every writer has a rhythm
to their language – in the plays of the best writers there is what appears to
be a magical quality to the flow of their language. It isn’t magic, it is an
understanding or words, how they fit together and the rhythm and sound
of language – as they use it. If you want to fracture your use of language
into short staccato phrases, you need to understand that this will have an
effect on the rhythm of your play. This will mean that the feel of language
will be different for an audience. I love scattered, staccato language, it can
Sound of words
Speak your words out loud. Keep your ear open for verbal trip hazards
and tongue twisters. Enjoy the sound that words make together. Aristotle
gives ample space to the study of how words sound in his Poetics, not a
great deal of use to those of us who don’t speak Greek but an appreciation
of the importance of sound in pronunciation, stress and inflection is
essential. Don’t overlook it.
Choice of words
Aristotle also gives plenty of room to the selection of words for meaning in
the chapters on diction in his Poetics and in his Rhetoric. The right words for
the right characters. The most effective metaphors. Your words are in your
gift. They are yours to choose as you see fit. Your choice of words is what will
make you unique. Your vocabulary, your syntax – these things belong
exclusively to you in the context of where, when and who you grew up with.
No one else has that. Use YOUR words. Play with them in the mouths of
the characters you create. But remember this: finding your voice as a writer
doesn’t mean writing every character with the same voice. And try to avoid
characters speaking in cliches unless that is what you want your character
very specifically to do.
One of the reasons we can tell that an Elizabethan play had more than
one author is because of the difference in vocabulary and rhythm of the
language. Language is our common denominator and our most individual
tool. And we can learn so much from how the great playwrights like
Shakespeare used language.
Shakespeare
Why do actors like to speak Shakespeare? Because he took the time to
write poetically. He cared about the words on the page. AND he knew
If you didn’t find all those percussive, alliterative p’s and d’s and t’s,
and that sublime sounding sibilance thrilling to speak, you are in
the wrong profession. You need to think about the words, the character,
the context, AND the sound the words make. Please don’t throw
away your words, they are the most important tool you have – without
them there is no play text. Use every word as if your life depended
upon it.
We don’t have to try to write like Shakespeare but knowing just a little
about how he did what he did with words is like opening the best present
any playwright ever received. If you want to refresh your writing and start
thinking about it in different ways, the best place to start is with
Shakespeare. If you take a moment to understand, read and speak
Shakespeare’s words, a whole new world of dramatic language will open
up before you. Understand what Shakespeare did and take it to new
places. If there’s one giant upon whose shoulders we should all seek to
stand it is William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote in Blank Verse – unrhymed lines usually in iambic
pentameter (five iambic feet):
, pause
... a change in train of thought, a pause
/ overlapping speech begins here7
– a dash at the end of a line indicates an interruption
[] words in square brackets are not spoken
Italics for emphasis
CAPS FOR EMPHASIS
. after each word in a sentence Gives. The. Words. Equal. Weight.
In my play Lush Life about a jazz singer, mentioned at the start of this
chapter, I was faced with the challenge of writing five actors playing the
same role using overlapping and sometimes simultaneous speech. It was
driving me crazy trying to manage all the intersecting dialogue – until I
hit upon the solution of setting out the dialogue in five rows like a musical
stave. On the page, it looks brazenly pretentious, but it works a treat.
The great thing about all this is that you can make up your own system
of punctation – so long as you explain it at the start of your play! A play
does not need to be grammatically correct, but it does need a coherent
and consistent use of dramatic punctuation.
Manifest metaphor
In How I Learned to Drive Paula Vogel shows us how the character of Li’l
Bit was abused using the metaphor of learning to drive – neutral gear,
first to second, etc. But, being Paula Vogel, she also not only uses driving
as a metaphor for sex she uses it as a metaphor for time, life skills, and,
literally, as what it is, driving. She also gives the abuser (Uncle Peck) a
speech which uses fishing as a metaphor for grooming and abuse.22 How
I Learned to Drive is a play rich in ideas and should be at the top of every
ambitious playwright’s ‘To Read’ list.
Monolingual translation
How do you speak in different languages on stage whilst keeping the play
in one language? Ask Paula Vogel. In Indecent when characters speak
Yiddish, they speak in perfect English, when they speak English as their
second language, they speak with a slightly broken accent. It works. Ask
Brian Friel. In Translations some characters speak Irish, some characters
speak English, but the whole play (apart from some Latin and Greek) is
spoken in English. How? Through the rhythm of Irish-English and
idiomatic differences spoken by the Irish characters, and the neater
English of the English characters. It works. Don’t believe me? Read the
play, it is superb.23
Be a poet
Don’t be frightened by the idea of poetry. All you need to do is take
everyday speech and heighten it. Listen very, very carefully to the way
people speak and then play with the irregularities, repetitions, digressions,
hesitancies. There is a world of dramatic prosody in everyday speech
pattens.
Talking about her early work in a rare interview in The Guardian
debbie tucker green said, ‘I was just messing about, writing stuff down
Finally
4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane is an extraordinary play. A play that is
extraordinary on the stage (in the right hands) and extraordinary on the
page. A play with no cast list, no indication of how many actors are
required, no indication of set, no indication (other than in the spoken
text) of where or when anything in the play takes place, fragments of
dialogue, indented speech, lists of pain, scattered numbers, poetic
wordplay, repetition, space, and more pain, so much pain. If you haven’t
read it, do yourself a favour and buy a copy. You will not be disappointed.
And if you are, you’re definitely in the wrong job.
Language is our lifeblood, it is our vital fluid, it is our gore. The pulse of
our words is essential for the life of our plays. Think about the words you
use. Think with more adventure, more ambition, more beauty. Respect
words. Cherish them. Love them. Then give them away.
Many of the new writing practitioners I worked with in the 1990s had a
purist steak that dictated that musical theatre was to be avoided at all costs.
But I had a dark secret, I wanted to write a musical. Most of my plays have
music or musicians at the centre of them, largely because I love music and
that was the world I lived in and knew better than any other, but they
weren’t musicals. For years, I had been trying to work up the courage to
suggest to the Theatre Royal Stratford East that I should write a musical
for them, but I had never quite been brave enough. Then something
happened that was like a synchronistic thunderbolt from the gods. I don’t
believe in synchronicity or gods for that matter, but it was just what I
needed to give me a little bit of a push in the direction of musical theatre.
This is what happened.
In 1999, I was working as Literary Manager at Soho Theatre Company,
and at this point Soho was in a state of limbo between the company’s
most recent home at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone and the
synagogue in Dean Street that was to become the company’s new home.
At this moment in time Soho consisted of a handful of employees working
from a small office in Mortimer Street in the West End. We had been
based at the office for about eighteen months when I left work one
evening and passed a cardboard box that had been left outside a building
a couple of doors down the street. The contents of the box caught my eye,
they looked a bit like dog-eared scripts, but I’m not a natural scavenger so
I kept on walking. However, my curiosity got the better of me and I
doubled back to take a closer look. I was right, they were scripts. Looking
around to make sure no one was watching, because, although I’m not
Catholic, I live my life in an almost permanent state of guilt, I leant down
and took one of the scripts out of the box. It was an exhausted copy of the
libretto for West Side Story – which just happens to be my favourite
musical of all time.1 There were two or three more exhausted copies of the
West Side Story in the box with their orange covers hanging on by the
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slenderest of publisher’s threads, but underneath these was a libretto with
a yellow cover, it was a copy of Guys & Dolls – which just happens to be
my second favourite musical of all time.2 I continued to dig through the
box and found a third musical, Carousel, which, at the time, I didn’t know.3
How on earth did these librettos, which are incredibly hard to get hold of,
find their way into a box, a couple of doors down from Soho’s office,
where I would find them? Perhaps there was a god after all, I thought. But
looking up at the small sign jutting out above the door of the office
outside which the box had been dumped, I read the name Josef Weinberger
and suddenly it all made sense. Josef Weinberger Ltd is a licensing agent
for musicals and these were obviously copies of some of the musicals they
licensed that they considered to be too worn out to be hired out anymore.
They were going to be pulped. So, I did what any decent-minded citizen
would do, I stealthily picked out the librettos in best condition and
looking around to make sure Stephen Sondheim or Rogers and
Hammerstein weren’t watching, shoved them in my bag and walked
swiftly to the tube station.
Over the next few months, I studied the librettos intensely, then, out of
the blue, I got a phone call from Philip Hedley, the Artistic Director at
Stratford East, who wanted to know if I had any ideas for a musical. I did.
I have never been able to work out why so many contemporary playwrights
seem so frightened to include music or songs their plays. What are they
frightened of? Is mixing the text of a new play with a song a crime? Is it
considered to be in bad taste? Get over yourselves! Music has phenomenal
potential for a playwright. I’m not suggesting you need to put a torch
song and tap routine in every play you write, I’m just pointing out that to
turn your back on such potent performative potential is a bit blinkered.
We tend to forget that music was an integral ingredient of Greek
drama. The text of a Greek tragedy is rhythmical, it was written to be sung
or performed as a kind of recitative (a form of musical declamation in the
rhythm of ordinary/iambic speech) and, accompanied by the flute and
sometimes the lyre, it was a fundamental a part of the delivery of the text.
Music was at the heart of all great Greek drama.
If you visited the theatre in seventeenth-century London (not during
the plague or Civil War or during the years of Cromwell’s reign when
plays were banned, though) you might have been entertained with a short
By the way, writing a musical isn’t fast – average five years development
– so get ready for the long haul.
My first musical, The Big Life, took twenty-five years to reach the stage.
The process began when I was at school. The Shakespeare comedy I
studied for my ‘A’ Level in English Literature was Love’s Labour’s Lost. I
remember thinking to myself at the time that the story of four men who
decide to give up relationships with women for three years to improve
themselves with study would make a great plot for a musical. Twenty
years later, when Philip Hedley asked me if I had any ideas for a musical,
the idea of adapting Love’s Labour’s Lost popped back into my head. I
proposed it, Philip liked it, suggested that I work with the great reggae
musician, Paul Joseph, and we were up and running.
I did a scene-by-scene breakdown of the play, laid my story over the
top, wrote the book and lyrics, gave them to Paul Joseph to write the
music, and, hey-presto, we had the beginnings of a musical. We were
lucky to be in the very capable dramaturgical hands of the multi-talented
actor-director-writer Clint Dyer to develop the musical and the show
grew from there. Subsequent rewrites led us further and further away
from the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost as our musical found its own narrative
imperatives, but I always knew the original play was there to guide us if
we came unstuck. It took just over five years to write it and get it produced,
but it was worth the wait.
Using a Shakespeare play as the basis for a new musical is an old trick
– Romeo and Juliet as West Side Story; Taming of the Shrew as Kiss Me
Kate;19 Comedy of Errors as The Boys from Syracuse20 – so it wasn’t exactly
an original idea, but it was an accidentally brilliant way to begin to learn
how to write a musical.
Opera
I was asked by one of my peers to write something about writing an opera
in this book. I agreed it was important to include the opera librettist’s art,
but, unfortunately, although I have come close on a couple of occasions, I
have yet to write a libretto for an opera, so I felt like a bit of a fraud.
However, I am fortunate enough to know the brilliant Cecil Castellucci
and Emma Muir-Smith. Cecil is an author of books, graphic novels and
libretti, based in the USA, and Emma is a singer, librettist and opera
director in Australia. So, I asked them if they could give me a few tips.
Cecil was keen to point out that she has no formal training in writing
libretti and that she is more in the new-opera-for-all-make-it-less-stuffy
camp. That sounded perfect to me. This is what Cecil wrote:
You can tell that both Cecil and I used to be in bands – I also make up
melodies for the lyrics I write for my musicals, even when I’m not the
composer. It is imperative to know that your words can be sung, so what
better way to find out than by singing them to yourself. Thank you, Cecil.
Emma is steeped in opera and offered these five fantastic top tips:
Brilliant tips and she’s right about ‘word painting’! Thank you, Emma.
If all the above seems a bit much for your playwriting sensibilities to deal
with, how about writing a play with original songs? Usually diegetic, these
plays simply feature characters picking up an instrument and playing and
singing a song.24 Or you can use songs (performed live, please) as an
interlude between scenes. Or just stop the play and sing a song. Just don’t
overlook the power a song can bring to a play.
Alternatively, there is the much-maligned Juke Box or back-catalogue
musical. Write a show that slots together the songs of your favourite
bands. Don’t sneer. It’s fun. And it’s a challenge – you need to do a lot of
lateral thinking that can take you to some very interesting places and lead
to innovative solutions. Just because it’s a Juke Box musical is not an
excuse for a bad script, let it stretch you, find a way of doing things that is
new. And if you’re still sneering, spare a moment to think of the playwright
Catherine Johnson who, with no previous experience, wrote the book for
Mamma Mia – didn’t do her any harm, did it? And at the very least it’s a
fantastic excuse to listen to lots of songs by your favourite songwriters all
day and do what we are supposed to like doing – making up stories.
As ever, I would like to challenge you to learn all you can about writing a
musical or an opera, and then do it differently. Bring who you are to the
game. Like Lin-Manuel Miranda did. And at this point, I would like to
sing a familiar tune – it is called Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and
this time it is going to be sung by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Lin stood on the
shoulders of his rap heroes and his musical theatre heroes, but arguably
no one more so than the great Jonathan Larson, the writer of the ground-
breaking, rule-bending musical Rent.25
Lin-Manuel Miranda was hugely influenced by Rent, and it is easy to
understand why. Rent is a re-working of Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera
La Bohème, but at the same time it is also one of the most innovative
pieces of theatre of the late twentieth century.26 Larson was one of a kind,
a unique character who channelled his ambitious, iconoclastic worldview
Finally, some words of wisdom for anyone currently slogging through the
writing of a new musical or libretto. As the character of Rose in Gypsy
says, ‘If you have a good strong finish, they’ll forgive you for anything.’27
135
might land on him, the thickness of the forest, and awareness of everyone
around him, etc . . .The march continues for as long as is appropriate.’1 In
performance, this simple stage direction transformed into an
extraordinary physical sequence which, through movement alone,
demonstrated the fear, exhaustion and dehumanization of John’s character
on his four-week long march to the LRA base in Sudan. What struck me
most was the power of John’s non-verbal physical communication; the
movement said so much more than any amount of text could ever have
done.
I asked John if he could tell me something about his writing process.
This is what he had to say:
I agree with John, we are writing for an audience not a reader. We can
also learn a lot from John’s physical approach to creating character. I
wonder how many playwrights try to get to grips with what it physically
feels like to be a character before they write them. I wonder how much
more potent our characters might be if we could physically feel more like
them, like an actor, as we write them. By feeling the character in our
bodies, by sensing them from the inside-out, rather than imposing on
them from the outside-in, perhaps we might create more dynamic
characters.
Playwrights, you need to remember that actors have bodies as well as
heads. Bodies that breathe, bodies that move, bodies that can tell stories
without a single word ever being uttered. Actors aren’t just talking heads.
I think we all need to use the physical aspect of performance more.
Perhaps you are worried that you don’t know how to write it. Perhaps we
all spend too much of our time sitting down on our backsides. Whatever
the case, it’s a missed opportunity. You don’t have to have studied
What a fantastic gift to a movement director, and not a box step, heel
turn, arabesque or cha-cha in sight! All you need to do is think about the
kind of movement sequence you would like and leave the rest up to your
collaborators.
Incorporating movement is not a new concept. Movement was an
essential part of Greek drama; for individual actors and chorus members,
it was part of the delivery and interpretation of a text. Most of the
movement was expressive of character or situation, similar to the way
that symbolic movement and gesture is outlined in the Sanskrit treatise
on dramaturgy, the Nā.t yaśāstra. In the case of the individual actor, the
movement would be singular and in rhythm with their dialogue, status
and situation; for the chorus, it was more likely to be a unison moment
symbolizing the meaning of their text. The thrill of movement, dance
theatre, physical theatre, call it what you will, is immense. We need to
break down the barriers between the physical and the text. We need to
explore and understand the joy and potential of physical performance
and we need to put it into our plays.
We are not afraid to let dance do some storytelling in musical theatre,
so why are we frightened to experiment with more movement in our
dramas?
Dance illuminates. Movement can colour speech, it can be used
instead of speech, to physicalize the sub-text, and to say with movement
what cannot be said with words. Movement is a universal language that
we can all understand. There is no need for translation. Metaphor is
141
Over the last sixty years, new plays by new writers have shrunk. They
have withered into little, predominantly naturalistic nuggets of drama
with two or three characters. We have escaped the refined upper-middle-
class drawing room for the shabby working-class sitting room. As far as I
am aware, our imaginations haven’t become smaller, so why have our
plays? What happened?
Part of the problem, I believe, is that today wannabe playwrights are
weaned on a diet of small cast plays. If you live in the UK and want to
write plays, you are likely to be drawn to the great new writing theatres in
London and Edinburgh, places like the Royal Court, the Bush, the
Traverse. More often than not the plays produced in venues like these will
have a small cast – not because the people programming these theatres
only want to produce small-scale plays, but because the economics of
production make it almost inevitable. Every now and then a slightly
bigger play will come along – for example, Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth1
– but often these plays come with potential West End transfer money
already attached. The vast majority of plays don’t, so they need to fit the
new play paradigm – a small cast, and (usually) one set.
Ambitious, aspirant playwrights study the early, successful, small-scale
plays of great contemporary writers like Alice Birch and Ella Hickson and
think to themselves, if I want to be the next Birch or Hickson, I have to
write small plays too! They watch small-scale plays at the Royal Court and
the Bush and the Traverse, they are inspired by these small plays, and they
are encouraged to write small plays.
New playwrights get little or no encouragement to write their big new
play because they rarely see one performed. They get little or no education
in how to write big plays because they are soon discouraged by the paucity
of production opportunities. Budding playwrights struggle to write plays
on a larger scale – plays like King Lear or Bartholomew Fair that ran for
three-plus hours, had huge casts, a multitude of locations and even sub-
plots(!) – for a number of reasons. The most pressing of which is that,
today, if a playwright writes a large-scale, big-cast play, complete with a
sub-plot(!) the chances of production at a new writing theatre are incredibly
slim. In the UK today, there are basically three options: the National
Theatre, the RSC, or a drama school. A cast of six will make most producers
at a new writing theatre company break out in a cold sweat. A cast of eight
in a new play by a new writer is likely to be dismissed immediately.
I believe the root problem lies in that most sensible of all nouns:
pragmatism; and that most pernicious of all human inventions: money.
You’ve got a big story, it’s going to be a big play, it needs a big cast . . .
Where do you start?
Let’s take the deductive Shakespearean route and make a plan. NB.
Any resemblance to King Lear is entirely intentional . . .
Let’s say you’ve got a story about an ageing entrepreneur who wants to
pass his business empire onto one of his three daughters, but before
making his choice he wants to find out who loves him the most (it’s a
story about succession . . .) Our story ends with the entrepreneur going
mad and dying along with the daughter who loves him the most – who he
thought loved him the least!
You’ve got thirty actors.
Entrepreneur
Daughter #1
Daughter #1’s husband
Daughter #1’s loyal PA
Daughter #2
Daughter #2’s husband
Daughter #3
Daughter #3’s friend – a doctor
Businessman in love with Daughter #3
Another businessman in love with Daughter #3
Entrepreneur’s Right-hand man
Right-hand man’s son #1 (also an employee)
Right-hand man’s son #2 (also an employee)
Right-hand man’s son #2’s friend
Right-hand man’s right-hand man
Old man that lives in one of Right-hand man’s properties
Loyal Executive
Funny guy who works for the entrepreneur
Journalist
Motorcycle Messenger
Employees
Other businessmen and women
Act 1 Scene 1
The Board Room
Part 1. The Entrepreneur’s Right-hand man, his son #2, and the Loyal
Executive discuss the impending division of the Entrepreneur’s
family business.
Act 1 Scene 2
An Office
Right-hand man’s son #2 is annoyed that he might miss out on his
promotion in favour of Right-hand man’s son #1. He decides to
take matters into his own hands. He tells Right-hand man that he
has seen an incriminating email from Right-hand man’s son #1.
Then he tells Right-hand man’s son #1 that he’s got his back.
Act 1 Scene 3
Daughter #1’s House
Now that Daughter #1 has power, she turns cold on her father.
Act 1 Scene 4
Daughter #1’s House
Entrepreneur and his retinue arrive for a visit. They laugh and drink,
they are in high spirits. Daughter #1 gives Entrepreneur the cold
shoulder. He leaves for Daughter #2’s house.
I could go on. But I don’t need to because you get the gist, and you can
stand on this giant’s shoulders just as well as I can. If we break the first act
of King Lear down into its most basic beats, we have:
Easy enough, isn’t it? Move between large-scale scenes where the lead
character is at the centre of the action and smaller ones with a tighter
focus.
Just because you can write a good play with four characters doesn’t
automatically translate into writing a play with a bigger cast. If you want to
learn how to do it, take any play by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson
and a host of others, and do a similar analysis. Don’t be lazy. Don’t think
that because someone said you write good dialogue, you automatically
know how to write a scene with twelve characters in it. Study.
Take a look at The Antipodes by Annie Baker – look at how she manages
the group dialogue, look at how she avoids the dominance of sequential
duologues, look at how the characters take it in turns to assume focus (to
become the centrifuge). This is a play about stories, about who creates
stories, about what we – as playwrights – do; and there couldn’t be a more
important conversation for us, or for our audiences, to have. It is about
corporate storytelling versus the individual vision. Annie Baker’s play is a
If you want to know how to handle a large-scale play with a large cast,
start playing with ideas now. If you like the idea of going large, go large
now. Tony Kushner went large with Angels in America;7 Matthew Lopez
went large with The Inheritance. Brilliant playwrights, taking big chances
to write big plays. If it needs to be big, write it big. But even if you don’t
want to go big in terms of scale, never settle for less than big in the idea
behind your play. By all means write small for a small cast, but always try
to say something important, big, colossal even. Think big.
148 THE PLAYWRIGHT’S MANIFESTO
2.9 SHOCK, BREAK AND
PROVOKE
I have only ever been shocked in the theatre once. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t
gore, it was two words spoken directly to me from the stage.
In 2001, I went to see a production called First Night by Forced
Entertainment at Toynbee Studios in London. First Night was a seedy
variety show in which nothing quite goes to plan. It wasn’t the most
ground-breaking Forced Entertainment show I’d seen, but it had one
moment that seared itself into my memory for all time. This was when a
mind-reading act took to the stage and – very slowly and very deliberately
– pointed to each member of the audience in turn, and, told them how
they were going to die. It was one of those moments when you prayed
your seat would swallow you up and disgorge you somewhere into the
bowels of the London Underground deep below. I don’t know how many
people there were in the audience that night, probably about two hundred,
and I was hoping (along with most people in the audience, I assume) that
the mind-reader might stop their grisly predictions before they got to me.
Surely they wouldn’t predict the death of every single person in the
audience, would they? Yes, they would. On and on they went, pointing
randomly to each audience member and predicting death from cancer,
death from heart attack. On and on. They didn’t seem to care how long it
was going to take. Finally, they got to me, pointed, and said, ‘Car crash’.
And I thought: Fuck you, I’m not going to die in a car crash! I have, however,
never forgotten that moment, and every now and then when I get into a
car I remember those two words like a theatrical curse. After I had the
accident in Russell Square that nearly killed me, one of the first thoughts
I had was that if I had died at least Forced Entertainment would have
been proved wrong! Yes, I had been hit by a car, but it wasn’t a car crash.
If Forced Entertainment had set out to shock, as far as I was concerned,
they had succeeded monstrously.
149
I don’t think l have ever set out to deliberately shock audiences with
anything I’ve written. There isn’t a lot of sex and bloodletting in my plays.
There is some. There are a series of murders in Lush Life, but none of them
on stage. There is a death in Reasons to be Cheerful, but it is represented
symbolically. There is on-stage sex in Bad Blood Blues, but the plot
demands it. There is a lot of filth in Reasons to be Cheerful, but I would
argue that you can’t write a show with the songs of Ian Dury without a lot
of filth as that was pretty much his trademark.1 In this show there are also
a lot of what my disabled collaborators refer to as ‘crip jokes’ – jokes about
disability, but, again, disability is at the heart of the show, and I regularly
heard these affronts bandied about in the rehearsal room, so I always felt
they were justified. I suppose what I’m saying is that I have never used
shock to get attention. But perhaps I’ve missed a trick? You never know
what you might unleash by daring to step out of your comfort zone . . .
Notoriety
There was a time during the 1990’s when it felt like almost every play I
read or saw had buckets of blood, a blowjob, rape, or someone shooting
up in it. But the shock had gone. I can remember watching a young man
being bent over a sofa and anally raped by another man; I can remember
another young man getting a blowjob about two feet in front of me; I can
remember the front row of an audience I was in being handed a sheet of
polythene to protect us from the splatters of blood that were coming our
way, but I felt nothing. In-yer-face theatre had shocked me into numb
disinterest in the shocking. It felt like it had become a game of puerile
one-upmanship.
You could argue that Euripides made a name for himself by writing
plays with sensational content. You could argue that Shakespeare
enhanced his name with the gore of Titus Andronicus, one of his earliest
plays. You could argue that the bloodthirsty revenge and incest tragedies
of playwrights like Webster and Ford – that were doing the rounds after
Shakespeare called it a day – were written with a deliberate agenda to
shock.5 You could argue that Royal Court writers like Edward Bond,
Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill used shock to launch their careers. But
let’s not overlook the fact that all of these individuals happen to be very
Future shock
What is the most shocking thing you have ever seen on stage? Did it
make the play better? Did it make the play worse? Does shock work? Let’s
be honest: it does. Shock was why Grand Guignol worked.6 It is why
people still pay to go to the London Dungeon. It may be why people who
never usually go to the theatre queue for plays with sex and mutilation in
them. We love gore. We love sex. And we love it most when people are
pretending to do it in front of us. So, why not write a play in which
someone eats a dead baby, or thrusts a knitting needle deep into someone
else’s ear, or severs their own penis, or eats their lover’s eyeballs mid-
coitus? Actually, don’t do any of that because it’s already been done.7
Think of something even more shocking! Go on, I know you can do it!
Put it in your next play and really shock people! But only if it serves the
play. Gratuitous shock is pathetic. If sex, drugs or cannibalism are a
central part of your play, its theme, its vision, the BIG idea behind the
play, put them in. I love shocking stuff just as much as anyone else when
the shock has earned its right to be there. But I don’t think a playwright
should ever set out to shock for the sake of shock. If all you want to do is
shock, don’t write plays, write horror.
The interracial sex scenes in the first act of Slave Play by Jeremy O.
Harris are strategically shocking.8 We see what appear to be a sequence of
time-warped antebellum sexual encounters between three black slaves
and a white mistress, slave overseer, and indentured servant respectively.
Breakages
If the whole idea of shock is an anathema to you, I would suggest you ask
yourself how you can break things instead.
Here’s a quote from Tim Etchells, the Artistic Director of the theatre
company that so effectively messed with my head when they predicted
how I would die, relating theatre to a child’s elemental relation to a toy:
This is wonderful. And so much more exciting than working out how to
make people faint. If only every playwright asked themselves these
questions at the start of each new play. What happens if I write this scene
backwards, or speed it up, or slow it down, or break it into a dozen pieces,
or mirror it, or distort it, or cut it to the bone, or play it as farce, as melodrama,
as surrealism, or all of those at the same time. What might that do to my
play? Will it still work? Will it now work but in an entirely different way?
Lucy Prebble isn’t frightened to mix things up. She has very eclectic
theatrical tastes and she isn’t afraid to use them: mask, a ventriloquist’s
dummy, anthropomorphic symbolism, music, songs, and physical
movement/dance sequences in the same play.11 Why this obsession with
hermetically sealed forms like New Plays and Musical Theatre and Dance
Theatre and Physical Theatre and Mime when you can put them all in the
same play! Stop pigeon-holing drama and throw it all on the stage at the
same time. You know you want to.
Ask yourself: What are the rules? And then work out how you can have
fun with them, change them, break them.
Paul a Vogel once said:
I always ask myself, ‘What are the rules right now?’ And then I break
them. For years, it was believed that linear storytelling was the way to
write a play. None of my plays are linear. I’m not interested in business
as usual. Now that non-linear playwriting is common, I might consider
writing a linear play.12
The impossible
How about setting yourself the challenge of writing something that it
would be impossible to stage? This is what Paula Vogel sometimes gets
Provocations
Finally, if I haven’t annoyed you enough in this chapter, here are some
provocations to wind you up just a little more.
Devil’s Advocate
● Let’s ban all plays that don’t strategically shock
● Let’s ban all plays that don’t seek to break things
●
Let’s ban all plays that don’t have a least one moment that is
impossible to stage
●
Let’s ban all plays that don’t question what theatre is and how
theatre works
● Let’s ban all naturalistic plays without at least one non-naturalistic
element
● Let’s ban all plays written in a single genre
● Let’s ban all serious plays that don’t have at least one funny
moment, and all comedies that don’t have something serious to say
● Let’s ban all plays that don’t have at least one song and/or dance
and/or physical sequence in it
● Let’s ban plays that don’t acknowledge the audience
●
Let’s ban all plays that don’t force the audience to engage with it
● Let’s ban plays that don’t use live musicians
● Let’s ban the use of film, video, projected images and computer
graphics in our theatres
On a practical front . . .
● Let’s ban all writers who don’t write with the audience and event
in mind
● Let’s ban all writers who bore audiences to death
● Let’s ban all writers who don’t shock us and make us laugh
● In fact, let’s force all playwrights to write at least one play that is as
shocking, provocative, disgusting, outrageous, funny, and as
perverse as possible . . .
Or, at the very least, let’s not forget these options are available to us.
159
performance and the audience is paramount. As Lehmann asserts in the
prologue to his seminal book Postdramatic Theatre, ‘Theatre means the
collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of
that space in which the performing and the spectating take place.’1
Theatre is a sensory, spatial, temporal exchange between audience and
performers, we inhabit the same space, we use up a small quota of our
lifetime together. It is not ‘us’ the audience and ‘them’ the actors, it is ‘all of
us’, together, in this space, now. All of which is more important to the
postdramatic theatre-maker than the text of the performance.
In postdramatic theatre, every aspect of theatre-making has equal
importance: words, bodies, props, lights, sound, audience, space, time,
everything. Most theatre of this type is auteur-led, or put together
collaboratively, devised, improvised. A writer may be involved in this
process; indeed, it could be argued that everyone involved in the process
is the writer, but the word on the page isn’t the driver, it is just one
component in the act of making a piece of theatre.
But here’s the thing, although text isn’t usually at the heart of
postdramatic theatre, I think there is a great deal we, as playwrights, can
learn from postdramatic performance. In fact, the term postdramatic is
sometimes applied to the more innovative playwrights among us; to
playwrights like Jon Fosse, Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp, who dare to
play with the very idea of text, who eschew cause and effect dramatic
conflict, who challenge form and who write with ambition, adventure,
curiosity, non-linearity and intellectual flair. These writers are inimitable,
but I have always been curious as to how they came to write their plays in
the way they do. This led me to conjecture that they may have been
influenced by the work of avant-garde, postdramatic theatre-makers, and
this, in turn, led me to ask myself what the rest of us might learn from
postdramatic theatre.
For the playwright, writing a postdramatic play means thinking
beyond plot, character and language. To write postdramatically, the
playwright must take into consideration the entire potential of the event.
They must embrace the liveness of the event, the temporal, spatial,
transient nature of production, the relationship between audience and
performers, and the possibility of confronting and shaking audiences out
of pre-conditioned passivity to live performance towards a more visceral
shared experience. The postdramatic playwright needs to think about the
unique opportunities that live performance offers, and to exploit them,
mercilessly.
2. The performer
The performer viewed through a postdramatic prism can offer up a host
of new refractions for the playwright. Consider the physical presence of
the performer – their body, their body in time, their body in this space.
What does their body represent? How might they use their body? How
might we, the playwright, instruct them to use it?
Consider the question of mimesis – to what extent is the actor’s
performance mimetic? We need to decide if the performer is representing,
presenting or simply being. Is your actor asking the audience to believe
they are someone else; are they acknowledging that they are presenting
someone else; or are they simply standing before us as the performer.
Character does not have to be at the centre of your play. Think
performer rather than character. Think performance rather than play.
Consider every element of performance as a performer. The lighting as
actor, the sound as actor, the space as actor, time as actor, a prop as actor,
audience as actor.
Ask yourself who attributes meaning to a performer – author, actor or
audience? All? Or none?
3. The audience
The audience is not a passive receiver. The audience is part of the
performance. The audience is a tool for the playwright.
The majority of audiences expect a story with a beginning, a middle
and an end. What happens when these expectations are subverted?
Potential boredom. Potential irritation. Potential walkouts. The challenge
4. Time
We live in the present moment. Life is a succession of lived present
moments. Theatre exists in the shared present moment. The moment a
performer screams, the moment a trap door opens, the moment a
spectator laughs. Many philosophies exhort us to live in the present
moment. Theatre is the present moment. It is the present moment shared.
In postdramatic theatre we don’t need to deny this fact. Of course, one
could argue that all theatre happens in the here and now, the difference
with postdramatic theatre is that it isn’t pretending that the here and now
is happening there and then (on stage). So, let’s address this in our texts,
let’s acknowledge that the play is performed in the present. Let’s allow our
collaborators to know we expect them to embrace the present moment of
the present performance.
Never forget the versatility of time on stage. We can make time stand
still, we can make it jump, bend, speed up, slow down, repeat, go
backwards. Time is one of the most extraordinary tools that every
playwright has at their disposal – and it is always now.
5. Space
I’m not talking about the stage set, I’m referring to the performance space,
the physical space, the performers relationship to that space and the
audience relationship to that space. These are things that, in my experience,
a playwright rarely considers in depth.
We need to ask ourselves if the space is part of the performance or
coincidental to the performance. We need to understand and utilize the
space. Tim Crouch informs us that no matter where his play The Author
is performed, it is always Upstairs at the Royal Court – it is a play about
writing a play that is produced Upstairs at the Royal Court, so it makes
sense.2 But what do the postdramatic playwrights usually say about
space? Very little or nothing at all. And for good reason, they don’t want
to dictate the terms of the space when they can’t know where their play is
being performed or what their future collaborators might want to do with
6. Symbol
Symbol is, and always has been, a strong element in all theatre. Put a vase
on stage – it will say something; take a cigarette from another character’s
coat pocket – it will say something; climb to the top of a mountain – it
will say something. We even created a form of drama called Symbolism.5
The question for the postdramatic writer is, how can I exploit sign and
symbol in new and invigorating ways? We need to make the ordinary
extraordinary because it is. Elevate the props. Spin the action around the
prop rather than the human. Use Brecht’s hammer to reshape things. Use
Heidegger’s hammer and when the head flies off re-examine the hammer
7. Logic
Does each text suggest its own logic? Are there rules that need to be
obeyed? How do we shake off the Aristotelian logic of beginning, middle
and end? Perhaps have some fun by setting up narrative expectations and
then defying them. Defy the unities.7 Defy logic. Dreams, desires,
nightmares, work, love, sleep, play – none of them need be tied to any
dramatic logic. Set yourself free. Build your own entropic paradise. Leave
your logic to the ironing and the dusting, let your unconscious tell the
stories.
Perhaps try to disrupt the traditional idea of form in order to shake
the audience from their comfortable preconceptions, to challenge the
dramatic unities, to surprise, to dispute conventions, and to open the
door on a new experience.
Is this reality on stage or is it fiction? Or is it both? Or neither? Up
to you.
8. Revolution
Let’s challenge ourselves to remake the theatrical universe for performer
and audience alike.
Think of theatrical conventions, then see how you can explode them.
Don’t destroy every dramatic tool for the sake of it, such revolutionary
zeal is not necessary, instead see what you can do to remake them. But
don’t strive for perfection. Drama, like life, can never be perfect. It is
messy, so don’t be afraid of the mess.
Magic. Theatre can make the mundane magic. It can turn convention
to chaos, politics to posturing. Magic doesn’t have to mean pulling a
9. The new
How can we create something new? By writing the present event, by re-
hearing and re-inventing the structures of language; by re-seeing the
context of the body, the soundscape of old words and neologisms, and the
visual representation of ideas; by generating image through the sense of
smell, fear through the sense of touch, catharsis through silence, and
metaphysics through spectacle; by creating a text in which no one thing
is subservient to another, with everything pulling, distorting, speaking in
theatrical tongues, taking us to extraordinary places. And, I would say, by
remembering diversity, remembering inclusion, and by thinking about
access. Anyone who wants to go to a performance should have access to
every moment of that performance, irrespective of whether they are D/
deaf, blind, disabled or non-disabled. Access should be at the beating
heart of our theatrical evolution.
169
D/deaf and visually impaired audience members which necessitates
reaching out through the fourth wall.
A visually impaired audience member will usually only have access to
one audio described performance during the run of a play. If they miss
the audio described performance and still want to go to the play, their
only option will be to attend one of the other performances and try to
guess what is happening on the stage. If they do manage to make the
designated audio described performance, they will be given some
headphones when they arrive to put on at the start of the play. The action
on stage is described to them by a specialist audio describer sitting
somewhere in the theatre, usually watching the play on a TV monitor. In
the early days of audio description, the account of what was happening
on stage could be very literal – red light, green light, walks to the front of
the stage – however, in recent years the description has become much
more engaged and creative and there are some excellent audio describers
doing a terrific job. But far too often the audio describer is still only
employed for one performance. Some theatres have tried to remedy this
by using pre-recorded audio description, this is progress in terms of
access, but it isn’t perfect. Theatre is a live event and performances can
and do change during a run, which means that pre-recorded audio will
either become redundant or misleading, and surely it also flies against the
basic pre-requisite of an artform that is a living, breathing, present
experience.
The challenge for the playwright is to write a play without the need for
disembodied audio description, and doing this requires the playwright to
transgress the unwritten law: show don’t tell. How can a visually impaired
audience member know precisely what is happening on stage if you don’t
tell them? It demands that the information is somehow delivered by a
character or assimilated into the dialogue, which forces the writer to
think tangentially. Instead of writing dialogue in the way that they usually
do, the writer needs to think about finding creative solutions to imparting
visual information. Anyone who has written audio drama will already be
ahead of the game in this.
Often, it isn’t possible to include all the necessary audio description in
the dialogue and a compromise will be needed in the use of an audio
describer. But this doesn’t have to mean someone tucked away in an
alcove by the props table whispering into a microphone, you don’t have to
hide your audio describer. In Reasons to be Cheerful, we put the audio
describer on stage in the middle of the action. The conceit was that he was
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3.1 THE WAY TO WRITE
175
down into basic areas of dialogue and structure and character, read as
much as I could, and taught by keeping one week ahead of my students. It
wasn’t ideal, but I learned a lot, probably more than my students did.
By teaching playwriting, I realized that I already knew the basics. In
other words, I had read, studied and performed in enough plays to have a
basic grasp of the fundamentals of playwriting. The question now was: to
what extent did I need to use the knowledge gleaned from teaching the
craft in my own writing? It is a question that we all need to grapple with.
Instinct, or Craft. Or both. If you are a new writer, I would suggest you
embrace the happy rule-breaking accident of your first play, just write it
and see what happens. Then, when you decide to make a career in this
joyous and infuriating business, learn your craft.
There usually comes a point when you will have to make a decision about
how you are going to write your next play. There is a spectrum of approaches
– at one end of which is the start-writing-and-see-what-happens method,
and at the other end is the plan-it-in-minute-detail-and-then-write-it
method. The question for you is, where do you position yourself?
In Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, he
explains that most of his plays are ‘engendered by a line, a word or an
image’ and that, ‘In each case I had no further information.’3 To find out
who the characters were and what was going to happen in most of his
plays, Pinter simply sat down and wrote. These plays were an act of
improvisation based on a moment of inspiration.
The writer, Philip Ridley, would seem to be cut from the same creative
cloth. He doesn’t plan anything. He said, ‘I deliberately get as lost as
possible.’4 That’s incredible, isn’t it? That’s inspirational, isn’t it? Except
that when most of us sit down and try to write a play like Pinter or Ridley,
it is usually a disaster, consisting of dead ends, diversions and total
breakdowns. Sadly, most of us aren’t Pinter or Ridley.
Writing like Pinter or Ridley is fun, but it can result in a horrible
sprawling mess of a play. And it can be doubly disastrous if you buy into
the legend-of-the-untouchable-first-draft myth. For reasons best known to
the muses, some writers seem to think that a first draft is a magical,
sacrosanct thing that must never be re-written. I don’t know how much
re-writing Pinter did or Ridley does, but for most of us I believe it is self-
defeating to think that our first draft is untouchable. We must re-write.
INSTINCT CRAFT
ORGANIC SCHEMATIC
IMPROVISED PLANNED
FLUID CONCRETE
INSPIRATION PERSPIRATION
RIGHT (artistic) BRAIN LEFT (organized) BRAIN
ARTIST ARTISAN
So, what works best? The answer is, whatever suits you, whatever gets
the results you want. But before deciding whether you are a fluid or a
concrete playwright, it might be worth reminding yourself that these
options are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Most playwrights are likely
to use both approaches when writing a play, navigating a dialectical
process:
If the wild artist writes the first draft, they are likely to need the reliable
artisan to help them knock the second draft into shape. If the Apollonian
playwright carefully crafts the first draft, they are likely to need the
inebriated Dionysian dramatic poet to give the second draft more
vibrancy. Mix it up. Find out what works for you. Swing between the two.
Alice Birch has gone on record as saying that it took her three days to
write Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. She had been storing up ideas for
some time, but she wrote it in a blistering seventy-two hours. Most of the
playwrights I know visibly sag when they learn this. How could she write
a play that is so utterly fantastic in such a short time? Firstly, because she
knew what she wanted to say. Secondly, because she knew how she wanted
to say it. Talking about writers who plan everything before they write
Alice Birch said, ‘I am definitely not one of those writers,’ but she wasn’t
writing into a void, ‘I had the form in my head.’7 She knew what she
wanted to say, backed up by the knowledge of the form it would take,
backed up by the intellect, backed up by the drive, backed up by the talent,
backed up by the craft.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to be able to write a
play in three days. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to
plan everything meticulously before you start tapping out a rhythm on
your keyboard. Try a bit of both. And always consider that different plays
may require different approaches, a commissioned community play
about a local sixteenth-century witch trial is going to need research and
Character
Language
●
Is my use of dramatic language appropriate?
● Is my use of dramatic language distinctive?
● Does everything I’ve written demand to be in the play? (If not:
can I cut it?)
● Is it self-indulgent?
● Is it what I expected? (If not: Is this a good thing?)
● Is it too ambitious?
● Is it not ambitious enough?
● Is it overwritten?
●
Is it underwritten?
●
Have I underestimated the intelligence of the audience?
● Have I overestimated the intelligence of the audience?
● Have I used any crude devices?
●
Are there any (enough) surprises for the audience?
● Is my research complete?
●
Does my play challenge conventions? (Do I want it to?)
● Am I true to the world of my play? (Does it have an internal
logic?)
Bigger picture
● Will the idea behind this play make it stand out for a Literary
Manager?
● Will the writing [my use of language] stand out for a Literary
Manager?
● Will the first five pages of this play grab the reader’s attention?
● Does my play demand to be produced now?
Once you have re-written the play you will now have your official first
draft. If this is a commissioned play and you are confident in your
relationship with the producing theatre you can submit your play and
continue to develop the play with them.
If you intend to submit your play unsolicited to a producing theatre or
competition, I suggest that you give it one last read and tinker before
submitting it.
An experienced reader will make up their mind about whether the play
they are reading is good or not in the first few pages. I have run several
playwriting competitions, often there isn’t enough money to pay for all the
scripts to be read in their entirety. This leads to a sifting process, a process by
which the reader will decide on the strength of a few pages whether a script
is worth reading in full or not. Always try to ensure that the first few pages of
your play are a strong representation of the potential of your play as a whole.
Subsequent re-writes
Chances are you will be asked to do more than one re-write. Dig deep
every time to understand the reasons why your director/dramaturg still
aren’t convinced. Try things. I have often found that, following a
conversation about something in a script that isn’t working, the director
might make a suggestion for a fix. Sometimes it is a great idea, sometimes
it isn’t. Your job is to decide which. In my experience the best solutions
come from the writer after they have gone away, thought long and hard,
and come up with something entirely new that hasn’t even been discussed.
Something I often refer to as the third way – something different to the
original idea, not the suggested fix, but something new.
Or final rejection
If, after all that work, you and your play get the boot, suck it up and send
your play somewhere else. In other words, get your play produced by a
rival new writing company to prove what a terrible mistake the company
that rejected your play has made. It happens! However, if your
commissioned play is rejected and you submit it to another theatre, be
prepared to start the development process all over again. Different people
will have different opinions and give different notes.
Finally . . .
If you are feeling a little jaded about the idea of beginning a new play,
perhaps try something different to see what it does to your writing.
Experiment with process. If you are a schematic playwright, try an organic
approach, or vice versa. If you usually write in the mornings, try writing
later in the day. If you take a year to write a play, challenge yourself to
write a play in three days. If you usually write a play in three days, make
yourself take longer. If you use playwriting software, try writing a play
without it. If you use a specific font and pagination, do it differently.
Change it up. See what happens when you try a different process. Do what
you need to do to keep the process fresh and alive.
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an idiot. Someone told Jeff the following day, he wasn’t bothered at all, he
just looked at me and said, ‘Told you.’1
I had learned the lesson that we all need to learn, sometimes, other
people know better than we do: THEATRE IS COLLABORATION.
These days, I often suggest to writers that when it comes to cutting their
play in rehearsals, they identify their favourite line in the play and prepare
to cut it, that way, none of the other cuts will hurt anywhere near as much.
Theatre is collaboration. If you don’t like the idea, then go and write a
novel. For a play to live, it requires other people. If you are fortunate and
you write a hugely successful play, you are unlikely to be present at every
production around the world. However, you are likely to be there at the
first production, and you will need to learn to collaborate.
Perhaps the first thing you will discover is that not everyone thinks the
playwright is the most important person in the production equation. A
playwright is certainly to be found higher up the food chain in theatre
than in TV or film, but it is rare today for a director and actors to pay
total, worshipful reverence to the writer, and defer to every dot, dash and
syntactical quirk of the text without question. You are just a cog in the
production machine – an important, initiating cog, yes, but just a cog.
‘But if it wasn’t for me there would be no play!’ I hear some of you cry.
True. But if it wasn’t for the producer, the director, the actors, the stage
management team, the crew, and everyone else working in the theatre,
there would be no production. And a play without a production is just
another file on your laptop.
To investigate the chain of collaboration for a new writer, I’m going to
outline a hypothetical process from submission of an unsolicited new play
to its eventual production by a building-based, new writing theatre
company. I should perhaps point out that in the real world, it is very rare for
an unsolicited play from an unknown writer to be produced. What will
typically happen is that your play, if it is any good, will get some interest
from the theatre, and that will result in some kind of relationship that will
eventually result in a play you write being produced. But once in a blue
moon it does happen that an unsolicited play is produced. We can all dream.
The director
In our scenario, you will probably redraft your play once or twice more
before the director gets involved. However, it might be the case that the
company you are writing for does not employ a dramaturg and the director
will have been working exclusively with you on the development of your
play from the start. Whether you have been working with a dramaturg and
the director now joins, or you have been working solely with the director
throughout, there is one thing you need to remember: your relationship
with your director is the most important relationship you will ever have in
the theatre. If you can find a director who likes your work, who admires
your writing, who wants to direct your plays, Hallelujah! If that director is
an associate at a new writing theatre, Hallelujah! If that director is the
Artistic Director of a new writing theatre, Hallelujah! The reason why this
is so important should be self-evident: it’s all about getting your play on. A
director with no affiliations will be a friend to bang on doors with, but an
associate can go straight to the theatre where they are an associate and
say, ‘I’ve got a great new play from [insert your name here].’ An Artistic
Director doesn’t even have to talk to anyone, they are the feudal rulers
of their own private fiefdoms, and if they like your play, they can do it!
While the Executive Director may have something to say about this, it is
The designer
Your designer is likely to be a long-term collaborator of the director, they
will probably have built up a trust over several productions, and you are
now entering their story.
As with all collaborations you will need to be open, to listen, and to
think like a shrink, in other words, analyse them, try to work out what
makes them tick, try to get an idea of how their relationship with the
No curtain.
No scenery.3
No messing about.
Duncan Macmillan would appear to be of a similar persuasion. In the
writer’s note at the start of his play Lungs, he informs his collaborators
Casting
Next collaborator: casting agent. Likely to be another of your director’s
friends. You will probably be asked about ideas for casting. You may have
some good ideas (some writers may know who they want); you may not
have any ideas (it is surprising the number of playwrights who don’t
know the names of many actors). It’s not your job to be a casting expert,
but you will soon learn that a play is only ever as good as its cast – so it is
very important to take casting very seriously.
I love actors, how they cope with the audition process is beyond me.
As playwrights, we have to learn to deal with rejection on a regular basis
because every play we write, and submit, is open to rejection. But for
actors, rejection is on a whole other level. If you are a good actor, you
should get a lot of auditions. If you achieve the success of getting a lot of
auditions, you will also be guaranteed a lot of rejection. And you have to
keep smiling the whole time. Actors, you have my admiration.
As the writer, you should be invited to attend auditions. If you are: go.
Perhaps you don’t think this is something you need to do. Think again.
You will learn a lot, especially when you hear different combinations of
actors reading the same scene from your play over and over again. The
audition process itself is arduous. You might know the moment an actor
Executive producer
At some point during this process, you are likely to be introduced to the
company’s Executive Producer, or perhaps Chief Executive, or Executive
Director (basically the same thing). This person is likely to be the joint
CEO of the company, alongside the Artistic Director. Reductively
speaking, this means that the Artistic Director does the art, and the
Executive Producer does the business. In reality it’s more complicated
than that: the Artistic Director needs to know their way around the
business, and the Executive Producer needs to understand the art.
Whatever the case, the Executive Producer is a Very Important Person.
They had to agree to finance your play. If your play loses the theatre a
small fortune, they are the ones who will need to take a long hard look at
the budgets, appease the board of directors, and try to make something
miraculous happen. In my experience, the people in this role have –
without exception – been amazing, committed, intelligent people. They
make our world function. They deserve our total respect.
NB: In some companies the Artistic Director holds both jobs.
Collaborators
I think the most important thing I have learned as a collaborator in the
production process is that when the process is well managed, the play is
enhanced with the addition of every new brain. We think differently. And
that is a glorious thing. When each collaborator’s contribution improves
the artistic whole, you are really onto something. It’s like financial
compounding. When your director or actors come up with an idea that
1 A Writer’s Note
2 Dramatic Punctuation
3 Dialogue
4 Stage Directions
1. Writer’s Note
You can put anything you like in your writer’s note at the start of your
play, but don’t get too carried away. In this case, less is probably more.
2. Dramatic Punctuation
I’m going to keep repeating this until it is second nature: all those dots,
dashes and slashes are there to ensure that the actors know the rhythm of
your language. They are your instruction to the actor. When you aren’t in
the rehearsal room, this becomes your method of collaboration with the
actors. It is your musical score.
Because there is no standardized way for how playwrights can use
punctuation, it is always best to include your way of doing things at the
start of your play so that your director and actors know what you mean
by the use of certain punctuation marks.
3. Dialogue
The way your dialogue sits on the page is incredibly important and
informative to your collaborators. Most of your text will probably be left
aligned, but if you centre some text and/or right align text, you are
4. Stage Directions
There is a fashion today for fewer stage directions which, I think, is
another encouraging sign when it comes to collaboration. As a fashion
choice, it shows that we don’t feel the need to tell our collaborators
everything, and that we are leaving room for interpretation. However,
stage directions are still very important, at their best they can be the
gateway for your collaborators to the aesthetic of your play.
Most great directors and designers will love a challenging stage
direction. As playwrights, I think we need to rise to the challenge set
down by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’9
Clare Barron offers some great challenges in Dance Nation; one of the
characters grows fangs and ‘chews off a chunk of her own arm.’10 Soon
after this, another character ‘grows taller’ and turns into a red-eyed pagan
god with a shadow twelve feet long.11 How are your collaborators going to
do that? Not your problem. It’s an invitation to be creative.
Jasmine Lee-Jones also loves to set her collaborators a challenge. In her
play Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, she includes Tweets, Memes,
gifs and emojis, and invites her collaborators to interpret them in whatever
way they will. What a fantastic way to invite a collaborative adventure. She
also likes to play with text in her stage directions, using a jumble of
overlapping, refracted text to literally show us in typeface that ‘The
Twittersphere completely explodes’,12 and at one point she warps a
character name in the text to suggest that we are entering a warped
Twittersphere world.13 Another simple device she uses is the repetition of
the letter ‘i’ to suggest that one of her characters is silent for a long time by
writing, ‘CLEO is silent. For tiiiiiiiiiiiiiime.’14 So much more fun than just
writing ‘CLEO is silent for a long time’. And towards the end of her play,
she also challenges her collaborators to solve the problem of what to do
when one of her characters ‘expands and swells in space.’15
Some writers attempt to nail down their meaning and intentions in stage
directions and explanations, yet we cannot help being struck by the fact
that the best dramatists explain themselves least.25
Life is too short to spend all day arguing about syntax and verbal
contractions, so try to plan your process ahead of time. You need to work
out between you how to get the best out of each other. Talk about it before
you start to write the play, discuss your strong points, your weak points.
The most important thing is that you find ways to complement each
other, and that the collaboration creates a spark that leads not only to a
great play, but one that benefits from the ‘two brains are better than one’
theory. Perhaps you have complimentary skills, perhaps you both like the
same things, perhaps you have diametrically opposed processes, whatever
the case, you need to work out what’s best. And you will have to learn to
compromise, whether you like it or not.
Musical theatre
Musicals require a book, a score and lyrics. As the playwright in the
equation, your primary job will be to write the book, but there are a
number of permutations in terms of the nature of the collaboration.
Collaborative permutations can involve:
The fifth permutation isn’t of concern, as I’m not convinced that working
alone counts as collaboration. If you intend to do everything yourself, I
wish you luck.
Opera
If you think I am overstating the importance of the composer in musical
theatre, I would like to up the hyperbolic stakes and suggest that in opera,
the composer is GOD.
As essential as the librettist is in the creation of an opera, the likelihood
is that their status will never equal that of the composer. Composers love
good librettists, without them their operas wouldn’t exist, but we don’t
even know the names of some librettists from the seventeenth century,
they were never recorded! At least these days librettist’s get their names
recorded, even if it is in little letters at the bottom of the page towered
over by the composer’s credit. I exaggerate, but it is galling.
You may be asked to write the libretto before the composer has selected
a single note. Perhaps you will be given some music before you have written
a single word. Perhaps you will be locked in a room together and not let out
until you’ve written something. Possibly the most important consideration
is the question of what you are going to write. If you have been asked to
come up with an original idea, your process is likely to be a lot longer and
have more false starts than if you have been asked to adapt something. In
any case, the same rules apply: listen, be respectful, discuss how you are
going to work together, make a plan. It may be the case that more face-to-
face collaboration is necessary in writing an opera – conversations about
scansion, recitative, arias, and dialogue (if there is any) – but the only
essential is that you find the best way of working together. And after you
have worked out how to work together and you have done the work, what
next? Here comes that army of other collaborators again . . .
Composers are passionate about their work. You should be passionate
about your work. And if furious rows are your style, just make sure they
Conclusion
Remember, almost everyone in the creative process will probably believe
their job is the most important one. And, in a way, they are all right.
Because we need each other; it is the sum of the parts that will make a
great production. It is possible for a great director or actor to make a poor
play seem a lot better than it actually is. It is possible for a bad director or
actor to make a great play seem dreadful. Identify the best – according to
you and no one else – and aim to work with them. If you can’t find the
magic in a collaboration, try something different, but don’t forget that
collaboration is the beating heart of theatre-making.
I have an annoying little epigram that I like to trot out to groups of new
playwrights I work with: Take your playwriting seriously; take the business
of being a playwright seriously.
Writing plays and earning a living is hard. Really hard. Even successful
writers – the writers whose plays are regularly produced – can struggle to
make a living, and will have to balance their playwriting with other work;
for instance, writing for other media, or teaching, or doing another job
entirely. Even deciding what other work to do is difficult. Do you aim for
a job in theatre? Perhaps in the literary department or in marketing or
front of house? Or do you keep your theatrical powder dry by doing
something entirely unrelated to theatre? An office job, temping, retail?
Only you can answer this question. I know a playwright whose day job is
being a lawyer; how they balance the demands of both is beyond me, but
they do. I know a playwright who works in a theatre’s marketing
department; how they balance selling the work of other writers when
they are burning to write their own plays is beyond me, but they do. The
sad truth is that if you don’t come from a family with the wealth to
support you, your life will probably get a bit messy, I know mine did.
I spent my twenties playing the guitar in various bands, but when I got
kicked out of the last band I was in at the ripe old age of thirty-one, I
decided to do what any sensible person would do, and leave that
precarious profession to get a proper job being a playwright. At least that’s
the way I usually tell it; the truth, as ever, is a bit more complex. I had
217
already made the decision to commit myself to playwriting about a year
earlier. I had sent a play to Stratford East and been invited to join their
writers’ group, and I knew I had found my aesthetic and spiritual home.
My masterplan was to ease my way into my new career by making one
more album and doing one more tour while I continued to write.
Everything was going well: I had recently married, I was earning a living
from the band, and writing in my spare time. But then I got the boot from
the band, and suddenly found myself thrown into my brave new world
prematurely. I decided against trying to get session work, or joining
another band, so that I could focus on my playwriting. But there was a
problem, I was now broke. So, I got a casual job working backstage in the
West End so that I could continue to write. I won an award for an audio
drama, but my wife was pregnant with our first child, and money was still
tight, so when a friend said he could get me a ‘proper’ job I decided to take
him up on the offer. Now I was working for a rapacious car parking
company during the day and trying to write at night. But attempting to
get into writing a play after a day of administering vicious Fixed Penalty
Notices was not easy. Then, just over a year after joining the writers’ group
at Stratford East, I was awarded a writer’s attachment bursary and told
that my first play was going to be produced. So, I did what all sensible
playwrights would do, I quit my job to write full time. My first play went
on, and six months later, I was broke again. I trawled through every
attachment scheme and bursary offer in the UK, and got a position as
writer-in-residence at Essex University. Respite . . . for twelve months. My
second play was produced. I managed to patch an income together from
commissions, bits of TV and radio for a couple of years. My third play
was produced. But I now had a young family, and I needed a more secure
income. I had to think very hard about what I could and/or should do. I
had tried balancing a brain-numbing job with writing and it hadn’t
worked, so when I saw a job advertisement for the post of Literary
Manager at Soho Theatre Company, I applied, and was fortunate enough
to get it. Ever since then, I have juggled writing and dramaturgy. And it
works, sort of, when you factor in the teaching I do, and the bits and
pieces of work I still do as a guitarist to earn a bit extra. Like I said, it’s
messy.
It doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it, the important thing is
that you make a commitment to writing. It is fine to work in a pub, or
restaurant, or diner while you write your masterpiece. That’s what
Jonathan Larson, the writer of Rent did.1 It’s fine to be an usher and
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all
the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.4
Bigger picture
You need to understand the different types of contracts. In the UK, this
means:
Contracts from the first three organizations on this list are regulated and
shouldn’t cause you too much grief. A commercial contract will require
an agent or advice from a lawyer or writers’ industry body. If in doubt,
consult the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) or whatever body
represents writers in your country. If there isn’t one, form one.
You will also need to understand what the contract is for. If your
unsolicited new play is going to be produced, the theatre company will
need to acquire the rights to produce it. This is referred to as the acquisition
of rights. If a company asks you to pitch ideas for a new play for them, and
they decide to pay you to write a play based on one of your ideas, this is
referred to as a commission. If a company want to produce one of your
old plays, this will be referred to as a license.
You will need to look out for the important clauses. Who owns the
rights to produce your play and for how long? Are their rights exclusive?
How much are you getting paid, how are the payments divided, and when
are they due? How much of what you are being paid is an advance against
royalties? What are the royalty splits? Are you getting paid to attend
rehearsals? (As mentioned previously, in the UK the playwright should
have the legal right to attend rehearsals.)
● Audio/Radio
● TV
●
Film
● Gaming
● Residencies: Hospitals / Prisons / Businesses / Universities.
Agents
At some point you will need to get an agent. It’s rare, but not entirely
unknown, for a playwright to get an agent before they are produced, but
it’s much more likely that you will only get traction with an agent when
you have had a play on somewhere. I don’t think there’s much point in
agonizing over getting an agent until you need one. It is rare, in my
experience, that an agent will make your career for you, but they are
indispensable when it comes to negotiating contracts. It is worth following
a similar process to the one outlined above for directors when
contemplating which agent or agency to approach. Identify the agents
and/or agencies that represent the playwrights you most admire, then,
when you get a play on, approach the ones you feel might have an affinity
with your writing. Bear in mind that agents sometimes specialize in
theatre, TV or film, but can also cover all areas. Ask yourself what you
want from an agent: for example, do you want a theatre specialist with
connections in TV or a film agent who sometimes works with playwrights?
Many agents – if not most – have too many clients, so it is often worthwhile
to begin by contacting an agent’s assistant(s). Agents’ assistants will one
day be agents in their own right, and will already be developing their own
lists.
225
several magazines and newspapers, but I didn’t read the reviews. I didn’t
want to feel like that ever again.
Years ago, before the news became digital, I read an article in The Guardian
newspaper about artists’ mental health. The article discussed recent
research that suggested the group of artists with the highest rate of mental
health issues was playwrights. I was not surprised. Our is a profession
strewn with potential mental health hazards like rejection, humiliation
and vulnerability. The thing that struck me then, as it continues to strike
me today, is that no one ever really talks about these things. It can be a joy
to write a play, it can be a joy to see it produced, and it can be the most
wonderful job in the world. But there is a dark side. For me, the time has
come to drag the demons and black dogs out into the daylight, so that we
can begin to name them, and start to think of strategies that might help
us to deal with them.
If you are the kind of playwright who has total confidence in their ability,
who knows they are a genius, who never ceases to remind people of that
fact, and who has skin as thick as rhinoceros hide, you probably don’t need
this chapter. If, on the other hand, you sometimes (or often) have doubts
about whether you can or should be writing plays, then please read on.
Having said that, writers of genius (if you are still reading this) please
take note: over the years I have met playwrights who considered
themselves to be of God-like playwriting stature – one or two of them
(annoyingly) actually were – but most of them weren’t, they just had an
extraordinarily inflated opinion of their own talent. On the other hand, I
have worked with many playwrights (predominantly women) who think
they aren’t very good, who are, in fact, absolutely brilliant, and, usually, far
superior to the writers who consider themselves gods. I suppose what I’m
trying to say is that your opinion of how good you are is not a very good
guide to how good you are in practice.
In my experience, most playwrights suffer from at least some doubts
about their ability. Doubts that begin from the moment we sit down to
write our first play. Parents, partners and friends will respect the time we
spend earning a living – whether by teaching, working in hospitality, or
stacking shelves in a supermarket – but for some reason they seem to find
it harder to respect the time we give to writing. In the early days, no one
is paying us to write, so we need to motivate ourselves, and to have people
Imposter syndrome
You want to be a playwright. You go to the Royal Court. There are all these
clever, trendy people talking about plays. They look cool. They look
confident. You think, what on earth am I doing here? I don’t belong here! I
don’t belong with these people! I’ve never even heard the names of most of
the writers they’re talking about. It’s mystifying. It’s terrifying. It’s another
world. Welcome! You have just been hit by the dreaded Imposter Syndrome.
Fear not, you are not alone. We all began as outsiders. We all had to
walk into that theatre, writers’ group, or workshop for the first time. The
feeling of being an imposter isn’t unique to you. I’ve never liked the self-
help mantra, fake it till you make it, but I do think it’s worth remembering
that it’s important to connect with our peers in whatever way we can,
even if it feels frightening. The life of a playwright is a bit odd in the way
we yo-yo from total isolation to collegiate playmaking, but we need to get
used to it. We are all imposters in the beginning.
Don’t believe the myth that playwrights are born not made. Many of
the greatest playwrights had to work like hell to get to where they are.
Don’t believe the great first play myth; you know, the idea that a young
writer sat down one day to write their play and it was a work of genius.
Even the ‘greats’ like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had written
many plays before they eventually got produced. Theatres like to present
Confidence
Some playwrights find it hard to even call themselves a playwright. This,
I think, is a matter of confidence. I once met a playwright who had had
one reading of their first play above a pub in north London to an audience
of about a dozen (including their mum and dad) who talked with total
confidence about being a playwright as if they were Tony Kushner. I know
other playwrights who still don’t think they are worthy of the name
‘playwright’ after years of writing. As far as I’m concerned, if you’ve
written a play, and you want to continue writing plays, you are a
playwright. You don’t need to wait for someone to give you permission to
be a playwright. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter about
your circumstances. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read every play
written by Shakespeare. You don’t have to be better than Shakespeare. You
just need to write your plays.
Confidence doesn’t come easily to every playwright, but every
playwright will need to try to develop confidence. In the first instance, the
confidence to write and finish a play. A lot of people want to write plays,
a lot of people start to write a play, a lot of people never finish the play
they started. Why? A lack of confidence tinged with the fear that they
aren’t good enough. You will also need the confidence to ask someone to
read your play, and have the confidence not to fall to pieces if they tell you
there are things they don’t like. You will need the confidence to submit a
play to a theatre, producer or competition; the confidence to deal with
rejection; the confidence to deal with the opinions of dramaturgs,
directors, actors, stage managers, marketing departments, front of house,
bar staff, relatives, friends and strangers; the confidence to get through
the rehearsal process, sit through previews, and endure Press Night (for
some, the cruellest playwriting torture ever invented); the confidence to
deal with reviews; and, finally, the confidence to do it all over again.
Pressure
Playwrights are great at heaping pressure on themselves: pressure to
write, to write better, to write more, to write the greatest play ever written.
Try to take the self-induced pressure off. After all, there are plenty of
people waiting to pile the pressure on without you doing it to yourself.
Paranoia
The fear that you are being excluded for reasons that you have probably
made up. The gatekeepers won’t let you in! They won’t read my play! They
won’t return my emails! They won’t come to my readings! The truth: the
gatekeepers are just trying to do their job to the best of their abilities.
Sometimes you’ll encounter inefficiency, but it’s highly unlikely that
you’ve been singled out for the cold shoulder.
I’m too old! I’m too young! Not every playwright is discovered at the
same age. Some get lucky early, then learn. Others learn, then start writing
later. Some have kids, then start much later. There is no rule that says that
if you’re not produced by the Royal Court before you are twenty-five that
Vulnerability as courage
If we do go ahead with our play, we need to understand that we will be
making ourselves both visible and vulnerable. Every time you finish a
play and send it out, you are making yourself vulnerable. This is especially
true if you have exposed that 0.19 per cent of you that is uniquely you, if
you have said things that others haven’t dared to say, or if you have taken
the risk of creating a character, or relating an event, that could be
interpreted – rightly or wrongly – as autobiographical. But, as the
American professor and researcher Brené Brown points out, vulnerability
Rejection
Life as a playwright will always involve the possibility, or should that be
the certainty, of rejection. It doesn’t matter how good you are. Or how
famous you are. It is a shadow that falls over us for our entire career. The
first play I ever saw was Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.3 I loved it.
At university, I played Reverend Hale in a touring production of The
Crucible.4 I loved it. When I decided to take myself seriously as a
playwright, I sat down to read Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends.
I loved it. Arthur Miller is one of the main reasons I do what I do. I adore
the man and his writing. However, when I was working as a dramaturg at
the RSC, I received a new play by Arthur Miller from his agent, it was
called Resurrection Blues.5 The play had premiered in the USA and his
agent was now looking for a London production. It still feels like heresy
to say it, but I didn’t think it was very good. So, I rejected it. I was that evil
dramaturg reading your plays. But bear this in mind, it broke my heart to
have to reject any play. I knew how hard it would have been to write it.
The people reading and judging your plays don’t reject them to humiliate
you, they do it because it is their job. If you’re on the receiving end, you
need to move on. If one theatre rejects your play, send it to another one.
You never know where, in the words of my friend and fellow playwright,
Patrick Prior, you might land a lucky punch.
Jealousy
No one wants your play. You are longlisted for yet another competition,
but you never win. Every day you read about other playwrights, the great
plays they have written, and what have you done? NOTHING! Naturally,
you start to get very, very jealous.
You see other writers getting produced. You see other writers, your age
or younger, doing really well. You go to see their new play. You think it’s
terrible. You don’t understand why people think they are so great. You
don’t understand why your plays don’t get produced instead. There’s a
simple way to avoid this jealousy: don’t judge yourself by the success of
others. Ignore them. Write a play. Write another play. Keep writing plays.
You have control over this. Leave other writers to their successes and
failures, and control what you can, control the work you do. Don’t let
jealousy turn into resentment, because your resentment might turn onto
bitterness, and that bitterness could stop you writing altogether.
Whether we like to admit it or not, the wonderful world of playwriting
is a competitive environment. Some playwrights will get breaks before
others. Some playwrights will be praised more than others. It doesn’t
Giving up
When it gets bad – when the pressure, exposure, anxiety, vulnerability,
rejection and humiliation get too much – you might start to think about
giving up. Don’t. At least, don’t make an absolute once and forever
decision. Give yourself some time off. Then come back and reconsider.
In the thirty or so years that I have been writing I have only seriously
considered giving up once. A show I had written didn’t go well; it was not
entirely my own fault, but I wrote it, so I cannot absolve myself of all
responsibility. I felt defeated. I felt humiliated. I felt ill. I started to think
very seriously about giving up. Because I have a bit of an obsession with
football, I wrote a list of all my plays, scored them like a football match – a
successful play might be a 3–1 win, an unsuccessful play might be a 2–0
defeat – and entered my results into a league table. I worked out that at
the end of the season, I would have been relegated. I really was that fed up.
I decided to give myself a few more weeks to think about it before making
a decision. I set a date. As the date approached, I was reading a book
called The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell and, purely by
chance, I came across a passage in the book about a test a playwright can
take in order to know whether to give up or not, ‘The test is this: do you
produce because you feel an urgent compulsion to express certain ideas
or feelings, or are you actuated by the desire for applause?’6 I knew I liked
applause. I knew I liked laughter. But I also knew I had things to say;
things that I believed were important, and it was more important to me to
get the things I wanted to say over to an audience in a theatre than to
receive an ovation. I decided to keep writing.
Some advice . . .
Write. Get the work done. Control what you can. Don’t obsess about what
you can’t control. Don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself. Remember
that everyone was an imposter once. Theatre companies don’t hate you.
Find strategies to help deal with the exposure. Find a mentor, someone
you can turn to when things get confusing, nasty or desperate. Don’t forget
that you are not alone: join a writers’ group, or set one up, because it really
helps to be surrounded by like-minds and spirits; join the WGGB, or
whatever writers’ organization that you think is right for you, organizations
like the WGGB fight for your rights, they deserve your support. We all get
jealous, but try not to let it take over. Rather than obsess about the success
of [insert writer’s name here] challenge yourself to work harder today than
you did yesterday. Vulnerability is courage. Rejection is part of the job.
Collaboration is unavoidable, so make the most of it. Some people will like
your plays, some won’t. You can’t please everyone, so don’t try. Critics will
write what critics will write. Read it and deal with it. Or don’t read it. Don’t
let star ratings dominate your life because one person’s star rating is not an
indication of universal praise or opprobrium. Humiliation is a part of the
learning curve. Check in with Bertrand Russell before you give up. Talk to
other writers about mental health, we need to admit to each other that this
is a challenging occupation.
Finally . . .
If you are struggling, find a listening ear, seek support, get therapy, and
don’t suffer in silence. Perhaps take some time out, give yourself a month
off, or two months, or six, or a year. Taking time out doesn’t mean you
If you are going to be the future of playwriting, and you are going to be
the future of playwriting, it is essential for you to engage with what is
happening now. Because it is only by understanding what is happening
now that you can begin to think about what you are going to do next. And
your next play is the future of playwriting.
You need to ask yourself what some of the best contemporary
playwrights are doing and what you can learn from them. Not what they
are writing about, but how they are writing about it; about their techniques;
about whether you might want to build on some of their techniques, or
whether, having identified what they are doing, you want to run in the
opposite direction. It’s all about now. Except that now is likely to be then
by the time you read this, so you may have to sit down and do some work
on your own now. You should also bear in mind that my assessment of
what the playwriting animal is doing today is going to be somewhat
slippery, given that it is subjective, and that the moment I try to pin it
down, it will have moved again. Playwriting is an elusive beast at the best
of times, but it is worth the effort because we can learn a phenomenal
amount from the best of our peers.
You might discover your writing is very fashionable, in which case,
perhaps ask yourself what you can do to give it a bit of extra edge. You
might discover your writing is very unfashionable, in which case, you
might decide to just keep doing what you are doing until the wheel of
fashion rotates back around to the way you write, and your style of writing
becomes all the rage again. You might be inspired to play more with
structure, with language, form, character, audience perception or audience
241
engagement. Most importantly, by connecting with what is currently
happening, there is a better than average chance that you will grow as a
playwright.
I think something has shifted in playwriting in the last decade, and the
thing that seems to have shifted the most is the number of brilliant,
theatrically driven plays written by a new wave of predominantly female
playwrights. There are some men writing extraordinary plays, but it is
mostly the work of the women that has excited me and suggests that new
theatrical writing has a very bright future. Of course, it may well be the case
that there have always been a lot of brilliant, theatrical plays by women, and
the problem has been that these plays just weren’t getting produced. It is
sadly still the case that fewer women playwrights are produced than men,
commenting on the 2020 Sphinx Theatre Women in Theatre Report in the
Guardian, playwright April De Angelis said, ‘I keep hearing how things
have improved for women in theatre, and that it’s not a problem but the
reality is that only 35% of new playwrights are women.’1 This is the kind of
statistic that just doesn’t make sense to me. I have run playwriting workshops
for thirty years and, in my experience, the gender balance in those
workshops is, on average, something like 80:20 in favour of women. How
does that translate into an almost inverse proportion in terms of production?
There is still a long way to go in terms of equality, but the women who are
being produced today are writing some of the most incredible and
intrinsically theatrical plays I have ever seen. These playwrights play more
with form and idea, and don’t seem to stick so rigidly to linear naturalistic
narratives. There is so much we can learn from them.
If you like things the way they are, if you think all of the plays you go
to see are brilliant, if you think all of the plays you read are written by
geniuses and there is nothing more you or anyone else can do, then you
are wrong. There is plenty you can do. You can do something new. You can
do more. You can go further. You can be the playwright that shakes the
world out of its aesthetic slumber.
I have a challenge for you: the next time you are writing a play for the
stage I would like you to ask yourself this question: What is it about my
play that is intrinsically theatrical? Or, to put it another way, what is it
about my play that means it demands it be produced in a theatre space
rather than in another medium? I want to challenge you to build upon
some of the things that I have noticed some of the more interesting
contemporary playwrights doing today, and to embrace the ideas that I
have put forward in this book.
Please stand on our shoulders, as we did on those that came before us.
Please learn from our innovations as well as our mistakes. Please always
have an open mind, a willingness to listen and to investigate new ideas.
Please stay inquisitive. Please let your plays be eclectic and never static.
Please celebrate your fellow playwrights. We are all in this together. We
need to appreciate and respect each other. Please surprise us with things
we never thought of doing and make our ghosts jealous of your wonderful
ideas. Please continue to question the very nature of playwriting and the
dominant forms of theatrical presentation of your day. Push forward.
Reframe playwriting for your own time. Please keep asking BIG questions.
And please don’t forget us. Please keep producing our plays. We wrote
them so that we could talk to you when we are long gone.
With love,
245
246
REASONS TO BE A
PLAYWRIGHT
This final chapter is for the bad days. The days when you can’t write, when
you don’t feel like writing, when you don’t see the point in writing. On
those days, perhaps come here, pick a number, and start reading.
247
and people who are wonderful, evil, inspirational, vile, beautiful,
downtrodden, happy and sad.
12 A play is the moods we have, the moods we might have, the
moods we are.
13 A play is a living reflection of who we are, what we are, why we are;
and, it can help us understand who we are, what we are, why we are.
14 A play can be like the blast of a trumpet, blaring out a truth; a
shaft of light, illuminating an idea; a bell, that resounds deeply
inside us.
15 A play is a conversation with other human beings. You can agree
with a play. You can disagree with a play. A play can make you
furious. A play can make you love the idea of love. A play can
make you hate the idea of love.
16 A play can observe and comment. A play can observe and say
nothing.
17 A play can reflect. It can reflect your life back at you. It can reflect
the life of someone you know, love, despise or admire. It can
reflect the lives of others. It can make you reflect.
18 A play can destroy. It can smash the world to pieces.
19 A play can educate, extend the moral imagination, offer insights
into other lives, cultures, ways, choices, many of which we might
never experience directly.
20 A play can be a window on another world, a world we never
knew existed.
21 A play can be a meditation. Or it can provoke us to change the
world.
22 A play can make us gasp in horror or scream with delight.
23 A play can help us to empathize, with an idea, with a character,
with ourselves, with a stranger.
24 A play gives each of us the power to live another life, the life of
the characters on stage.
25 A play can help us to forget our worries when we need to by
taking us to another world.
26 A play can speak to different people in as many ways as there are
individual audience members.
Chapter 1.1
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Shaun Whiteside (trans.), Michael
Tanner (ed.) (London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, 2003 – first
published 1872) p. 13. Some people might claim that when Nietzsche talks
about ‘art’, he is referring explicitly to music, however I would argue that the
music that truly moved him was that of Wagner, to whom this remark was
addressed, it was opera, it was music and spectacle, it was performance, it was
drama, it was theatre. And we shouldn’t forget that his love of art was initially
spawned by his love of Greek literature, by Homer and the tragedians of
ancient Greece.
2 Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Applause Books, 1991 – first
published 1964) p. 147.
3 Elinor Fuchs, EF’s Visit to a Small Planet, some questions to ask a play, The
Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Magda Romanska (ed.) (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2016) pp. 403–7 (p. 403).
4 Interview with Thornton Wilder, 1956, Playwrights at Work, George
Plympton (ed.) (London: Harvill, 2000) p. 13.
5 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, G. B. Harrison (ed.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1978) 3.2.21–23 p. 86.
6 The quote often attributed to Brecht is, ‘Art is not a mirror to hold up to
society, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ However, there is no source for
this quote which seems to have been appropriated and paraphrased from
Leon Trotsky who wrote, ‘Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does
not reflect, it shapes.’ Literature and Revolution (1923) Rose Strunsky (trans.
1925) uncopyrighted 1957 Russell & Russell, New York edition, Ch. 4:
Futurism, p. 120. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/
ch04.htm
7 ‘Ars Longa, vita brevis’ – Seneca quotes Hippocrates in the opening
paragraph of his essay, On the Shortness of Life, 49 ce (London: Penguin
Books, 2004) p. 1.
8 Sophocles entered Oedipus Rex as part of his trilogy in the City Dionysia in
427 bce , but the first prize that year went to a playwright called Philocles.
One of the most famous plays in the history of drama was entered into a
253
competition and came second. Think about that next time you get shortlisted
for a prize but don’t win.
Chapter 1.2
1 The Hostage was first produced at the Damer Theatre, Dublin, in 1958 in an
Irish language version entitled An Giall, before being translated by the author
and developed by Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop and produced at
Stratford East later the same year.
2 Stratford East, 1958.
3 Stratford East, 1963.
4 Paula Vogel quoted in Fifty Playwrights on their Craft, Caroline Jester (ed.)
and Caridad Svich (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 54–5.
5 Lucy Prebble quoted in Fifty Playwrights on their Craft, Jester, Svich pp. 214–15.
6 Bentley, The Life of the Drama, pp. 143–6.
7 Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 146.
Chapter 1.3
1 Caryl Churchill, A Number, in Plays: Four (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009)
p. 205. First produced at the Royal Court, London, 2002.
2 James Graham, This House, first produced at the National Theatre, London,
2012.
3 Peter Morgan, The Audience, first produced at the Gielgud Theatre, London,
2013.
Chapter 1.4
1 A View from the Bridge was first produced at the Coronet Theatre on
Broadway in 1955.
2 Guys & Dolls by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows was first
produced in an out-of-town try-out at the Schubert Theatre, Philadelphia,
before moving to Broadway in 1950.
3 The Interval, interview with Paula Vogel, 2017 https://www.theintervalny.
com/interviews/2017/04/an-interview-with-paula-vogel/
4 Paula Vogel, The Long Christmas Ride Home (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 2004) p. 5. First produced at the Long Wharf
Theatre, New Haven, in 2003.
5 Indecent, first produced by Yale Rep and La Jolla Playhouse in 2015.
254 NOTES
6 Our Town, first produced at the McCarter Theatre, Princeton, 1938.
7 The Interval, interview with Paula Vogel.
8 Newton wasn’t the first to make this assertion, the idea can be dated back to
the twelfth century and possibly beyond to the blind Greek mythological
giant, Orion, whose servant, Cedalion, sat on his shoulders to serve as his
eyes.
9 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London:
Methuen, 1920) p. 59.
10 Harold Bloom, Foreword: Who Else Is There, Living with Shakespeare,
Susannah Carson (ed.) (New York: Vintage Books, 2013) pp. vii–xiii (p. vii).
11 At the date of publication this play had yet to be produced.
12 Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda and James McCarter
(London: Little, Brown, 2016) p. 94. Hamilton was first produced at the
Public Theatre, New York, in 2015.
13 Interview with Lynn Nottage in The Guardian (2016). https://www.
theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/17/lynn-nottage-sweat-donald-trump-
bernie-sanders
14 Thornton Wilder, Preface to Our Town and Other Plays (London: Penguin
Books, 1962) p. 14. Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake was published in 1939;
Wilder’s play, The Skin of Our Teeth was first produced at the Shubert
Theatre, New Haven, in 1942.
15 Baltimore Waltz, first produced by Circle Repertory Company, New York,
1992; How I Learned to Drive, first produced by Vineyard Theatre, New York,
1997; Indecent, 2015 (see note 5).
Chapter 2.1
1 August Comte (1798–1857) developed his Positivist Philosophy in a series of
writings between 1830 and 1842 and in his book A General View of
Positivism (1844) which advocated the empirical, scientific study of society
and rejected intuitive knowledge and theism.
2 Charles Darwin (1809–82) was an English Naturalist who is credited for
developing the theory of natural selection.
3 Emile Zola (1840–1902) was a French writer who is best known for his
naturalistic novels and plays, including Thérèse Raquin which he wrote as a
novel in 1868 and adapted for the stage in 1873.
4 Nick Payne, Constellations, first produced at the Royal Court, London, 2012.
5 David Mamet, Oleanna, first produced by Back Bay Theatre Company,
Cambridge, Mass. 1992.
6 Alice Birch, Anatomy of a Suicide, first produced at the Royal Court, London,
2017.
NOTES 255
Chapter 2.2
1 Reasons to be Cheerful was first produced on tour by Graeae Theatre
Company in 2010.
2 The Big Life was first produced at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2004.
3 Bad Blood Blues was first produced at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2008.
4 Denis Diderot, Discours sur la poésie dramatique in D. Diderot Ouvres
Complètes III (Paris: Larousse 1970) p. 453.
5 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue 1–14 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press) p. 3.
6 An Octoroon was first produced at Soho Rep, New York, 2014.
7 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018) p. 10.
8 Duncan Macmillan, People, Places & Things, first produced at the Dorfman,
National Theatre, London, 2015.
9 Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance, first produced at the Young Vic, London, 2018.
10 Donja R. Love, One in Two, first produced at the Pershing Square Signature
Center, 2019.
11 Lucy Prebble, Enron, first produced at the Festival Theatre, Chichester, 2009.
12 Alice Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. First produced at the Royal
Shakespeare Company, 2014.
13 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair in Ben Jonson Four Plays, Robert N. Watson
(ed.) (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014) pp. 519–25 (p. 524).
14 A Very Expensive Poison was first produced at the Old Vic, London, 2019.
15 Lucy Prebble, A Very Expensive Poison (London: Methuen, 2019) p. 144.
16 Prebble, A Very Expensive Poison, p. 117.
17 Jesus Christ Superstar was first produced at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, New
York, in 1971.
18 Amadeus was first produced at the National Theatre, London, in 1979.
19 Fun Home was first produced at the Public Theatre, New York, in 2013.
20 Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, first produced at the Globe Theatre, now
the Gielgud Theatre, London, in 1960 (originally a radio play).
21 Dancing at Lughnasa was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1990.
22 David Edgar’s adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby was first produced at the Royal
Shakespeare Company in 1980.
23 Navy Pier was first produced at Soho Theatre, London, in 2001.
24 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, G. B. Harrison (ed.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1978) 1.2.67. p. 33.
25 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, D. R. Elloway (ed.) (London: Macmillan
Shakespeare, 1974) 2.2.132–3. p. 101.
256 NOTES
26 Fleabag began life as a one-woman play that was first produced at the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013.
27 Shakespeare, Hamlet, G. B. Harrison (ed.) 3.1.56–58. p. 81.
28 Clare Barron, Dance Nation (London: Oberon Books, 2018) pp. 53–8. First
produced at Playwrights Horizons, New York, in 2018.
29 Jasmine Lee-Jones, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (London: Oberon
Books, 2019) pp. 73–8. First produced at the Royal Court, London, 2019.
30 Brian Friel, Faith Healer, first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York,
1979.
31 Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donohoe, Every Brilliant Thing, first produced
at the Edinburgh Festival, 2014.
32 Arinze Kene, Misty, first produced at the Bush Theatre, London, 2018.
33 Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, Death of England, first produced at the
National Theatre, 2019.
34 Annie Baker, John, first produced at Signature Theatre, New York, 2015.
35 Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors, first produced at the National
Theatre, 2011.
36 Ella Hickson, The Writer (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018) pp. 33–5. First
produced at the Almeida Theatre, London, 2018.
37 Paul Sirett, Rat Pack Confidential (London: Oberon Books, 2002) pp. 9–10.
First produced at Nottingham Playhouse, 2002.
38 Tim Crouch, An Oak Tree, first produced at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh,
2005.
39 Tim Crouch, The Author, first produced at the Royal Court Upstairs, London,
2009.
40 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (London: Oberon Modern Plays, 2014) p. 19.
41 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 72.
42 Jonson, Volpone, Robert N. Watson (ed.) Epilogue 1–6. p. 169.
43 Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stanley Wells (ed.)
(Harmondsworth: New Penguin Shakespeare, 1981) 5.1.427–8. p. 122.
44 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, p. 85.
Chapter 2.3
1 Aristotle, Poetics 330 bce , Aristotle, Horace, Longinus Classical Literary
Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1982) T. S. Dorsch (trans.) p. 41.
2 Aristotle (Dorsch), p. 41.
3 Aristotle (Dorsch), p. 43.
4 Aristotle (Dorsch), p. 43.
NOTES 257
5 Bharata Muni, The Nā.t yaśāstra, Adya Rangacharya (ed.) (New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2007) p. 159.
6 John Carley writes: ‘Master Zeami reputedly likened jo-ha-kyū to the course
of a mountain river: jo is the tributary’s gentle rill; ha the river in spate as it
cuts back and forth between mountain peaks; and kyu the plunge of a
mighty waterfall into a deep and silent pool.’ John Carley, Renku Reckoner
(Darlington Richards, 2015) pp. 90–1.
7 Lope de Vega, The New Art of Writing Plays (1609) Brewster, W. T. (trans.)
(Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2009) p. 34.
8 Steve Waters, The Secret Life of Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, 2010) p. 13.
9 Arthur Laurents, Original Story By . . . (New York: Applause, 2000) p. 350.
10 Sarah Kane 4.48 Psychosis in Sarah Kane Complete Plays (London:
Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019) p. 208. First produced at the Royal Court
Upstairs, 2000.
11 Laura Wade, The Watsons, first produced at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 2018.
12 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, first produced at the Swedish Theatre,
Stockholm, 1907.
13 Arthur Miller, After the Fall, first produced at the ANTA Washington Square
Theatre, New York, 1964
14 Florian Zeller, The Father (Le Père), first produced at the Théâtre Hébertot,
Paris, 2012.
15 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin Classics, 2013) p. 89.
16 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot), first produced at the
Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, 1953.
17 Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde (Reigen), written in 1897 but not produced until
1920 in Berlin because of the play’s dissection of sexual morality.
18 Enda Walsh, Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Once, first produced at the
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, 2011 (based on a 2007 film of the
same name).
19 Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood had its first reading at The Poetry Center,
New York, 1953, before being recorded for BBC Radio in 1954. The first stage
production was at the Théâtre de la Cour Saint-Pierre, Geneva, 1954.
20 Moira Buffini, Loveplay, first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2001.
21 Thornton Wilder, The Long Christmas Dinner, first performed by Yale
Dramatic Associate and Vassar Philaletheis Society, 1931.
22 Harold Pinter, Betrayal, first produced at the National Theatre, London, 1978.
23 Caryl Churchill, Top Girls, first produced at the Royal Court, London, 1982.
24 Caryl Churchill, Blue Heart, first produced at the Royal Court, London, 1997.
25 For an inspiring exploration of story, including meandering and branching
structure, please see John Truby The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming
a Master Storyteller (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007).
258 NOTES
26 Nick Payne, Constellations (London: Faber and Faber) 2012, p. 2.
27 Simon Stephens, Heisenberg, first produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, New
York, 2017.
28 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, first produced at Cherry Lane Theatre, New
York, 1961.
29 Paula Vogel, Indecent, (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017) p. vii.
30 Hickson, The Writer, p. 57.
31 Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots (London: Bloomsbury
Continuum, 2019).
32 Rory Johnson, Letter in the Guardian, September 1991. https://www.
theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1553,00.html For a brilliant
explication of these seven stories, with two further additions, please see
Stephen Jeffreys Playwriting (London: Nick Hern Books, 2019) pp. 218–44.
33 Stan Heywood, Letter in the Guardian, September 1991. https://www.
theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1553,00.html
Chapter 2.4
1 David Edgar, How Plays Work (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009) p. 48.
2 Harold Pinter, Introduction to Four Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) p. ix.
3 Aristotle (Dorsch), p. 51.
4 Eddie Carbone is the protagonist is Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge.
5 Thornton Wilder, ‘Some Thoughts on Playwriting’ in Collected Plays & Writings
on Theater (New York: The Library of Congress, 2007) pp. 694–703 (p. 700).
6 A somewhat more sanitized form of the satyr play can be found in the rustic
romantic comedies of Elizabethan writers like John Lyly and Robert Greene
– plays that, in turn, influenced the more bucolically infused plays of William
Shakespeare.
7 Blasted was first produced at the Royal Court, London, in 1995.
8 The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus was first produced at the Stadium of Delphi in
Greece in 1988 before a run at the National Theatre two years later.
9 debbie tucker green, Random, first produced at the Royal Court, 2008.
10 Beauty and the Beast by Laurence Boswell, first produced at the Young Vic,
London, 1996.
11 Caroline, or Change by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori, first produced
Public Theater, New York, 2003.
12 Paula Vogel, The Long Christmas Ride Home, written underneath the title on
the cover and title page.
13 Bunraku originated in mid-sixteenth-century Japan and uses large puppets
manipulated by three puppeteers dressed in black. The character dialogue is
NOTES 259
spoken by a single performer/narrator who voices the different characters
using a range of vocal techniques.
14 Paula Vogel, The Long Christmas Ride Home, p. 6.
15 Prebble, A Very Expensive Poison, p. 56
16 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 9.
17 Barron, Dance Nation, p.19.
18 Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2018) p. 7.
19 Gregory Burke, Black Watch, first produced by National Theatre of Scotland
at the Edinburgh Festival, 2006.
20 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 9.
21 Oscar G. Brockett, Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre (Harlow: Pearson,
2014) p. 111.
22 Duncan Macmillan, People, Places & Things (London: Oberon Books, 2015)
p. 59.
23 Mark Joyal, Authors of Classical Greece, British Museum Website https://www.
bl.uk/greek-manuscripts/articles/manuscripts-of-classical-greek-authors
24 Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1997)
pp. 65–73. First produced at the Royal Court, London, 1997.
25 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., p. 51
26 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., p. 60
27 Hickson, The Writer, pp. 11–30.
Chapter 2.5
1 Aristotle (Dorsch) p. 65.
2 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, G. K. Hunter (ed.) (Harmondsworth: New
Penguin Books, 1967) 5.5.19–28. p. 132.
3 Peter Hall, Advice to the Players (London: Oberon Books, 2003) p. 18.
4 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, G. B. Harrison (ed.) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1978) 3.1.56–59. p. 81.
5 David Harrower, Blackbird (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) p. 1. Blackbird
was first produced at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005.
6 Peter Gill, The York Realist (London, Faber and Faber, 2001) p. 7. The York
Realist was first produced at the Lowry, Manchester, 2001.
7 Also known as the ‘Churchill-Slash’ due to this being a technique first used
by Caryl Churchill.
8 At the time of writing this book, the text of Shed: Exploded View was
unpublished.
260 NOTES
9 debbie tucker green interview in The Independent 27 April 2003 https://www.
independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/debbie-
tucker-green-if-you-hate-the-show-at-least-you-have-passion-117081.html
10 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 38
11 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 12.
12 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 16.
13 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., p. 19.
14 Lucy Kirkwood, Chimerica (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013) p. 11. First
produced at the Almeida Theatre, London, 2013.
15 Annie Baker, The Antipodes (London: Nick Hern Books, 2019) p. 9. First
produced at Signature Theatre, New York, 2017.
16 Lucy Kirkwood, Mosquitoes (London: Nick Hern Books, 2017) p.10. First
produced at the National Theatre, London, 2017.
17 Barron, Dance Nation, pp. 53–8.
18 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, pp. 74–8.
19 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., pp. 65–74.
20 Tarrel Alvin McCraney, The Brothers Size, first produced at the Young Vic,
London, 2007.
21 Mike Bartlett, King Charles III, first produced at the Almeida Theatre,
London, 2014.
22 Vogel, How I Learned to Drive, pp. 39–41.
23 Brian Friel, Translations, first produced at the Guildhall, Derry, Northern
Ireland, 1980.
24 debbie tucker green, interview in The Guardian, 30 March 2005 https://www.
theguardian.com/stage/2005/mar/30/theatre
Chapter 2.6
1 Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, West Side Story.
After try-outs in Washington DC and Philadelphia, the musical opened at
the Winter Gardens Theatre, New York, 1957.
2 Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows, Guys & Dolls. After a try-out at the
Schubert Theatre in Philadelphia, the musical opened at the 46th Street
Theatre, New York. (now the Richard Rogers Theatre) in 1950.
3 Rogers and Hammerstein, Carousel. The first Broadway production opened
at the Majestic Theatre, New York, in 1945.
4 Brockett, Hildy, History of the Theatre, p. 131.
5 Prebble, Enron, p. 20.
6 Prebble, Enron, p. 33.
7 Vogel, The Long Christmas Ride Home, p. 5.
NOTES 261
8 Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Gypsy. The original
Broadway production opened at the Broadway Theatre, 1959.
9 Arthur Laurents, Original Story By . . . (New York: Applause, 2000) p. 15.
10 Laurents, Original Story by . . ., p. 348.
11 Laurents, Original Story by . . ., p. 348.
12 Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution, p. 174.
13 Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat (London: Virgin Books, 2010) p. 23.
14 Philip Furia, Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997) p. 62.
15 Furia, Ira Gershwin, p. 81.
16 Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, p. 88.
17 Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, p. 103.
18 Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, p. 33.
19 Cole Porter, Bella Spewack, Samuel Spewack, Kiss Me Kate. After a try-out at
the Schubert Theatre, Philadelphia, the Broadway production opened at the
New Century Theatre, New York, in 1948.
20 George Abbot, Richard Rogers, Lorenz Hart, The Boys from Syracuse. After
try-outs in New Haven and Boston, the show opened on Broadway at the
Alvin Theatre in 1938.
21 Castellucci, Cecil. Email to the author. 26 October 2021.
22 Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa, La Bohème, first produced
at the Teatro Regio, Turin, in 1896.
23 Muir-Smith, Emma. Email to the author. 4 January 2022.
24 In recent years I have been fortunate to work with writer/director Peter
Rowe and composer/musical director Ben Goddard at the New Wolsey
Theatre in Ipswich on a number of new plays with songs.
25 Jonathan Larson, Rent. First workshop production at New York Theatre
Workshop, 1993. First full production at the same venue, 1996.
26 In her top five tips, Emma Muir-Smith recommends that you watch and
listen to Puccini’s La Bohème, I would recommend that you watch and listen
to Puccini’s La Bohème AND Larson’s Rent – produced exactly 100 years
apart, these two pieces offer a wonderful short education in the scope of
words and music in a theatrical context.
27 Styne, Sondheim, Laurents, Gypsy, Act 2 Scene 1 p. 2 https://kupdf.net/
download/gypsy-script_58c83c1bdc0d60b51333902d_pdf
Chapter 2.7
1 John Rwothomack, Far Gone (London: Nick Hern Books, 2022) p. 12.
262 NOTES
2 Rwothomack, John. Email to the author. 6 February 2022.
3 Prebble, Enron, p. 36
Chapter 2.8
1 Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem, first produced at the Royal Court, London, 2009.
Jerusalem has sixteen characters, usually played by fourteen actors.
2 Vogel, Indecent, p. 6.
3 Robert Lepage, The Far Side of the Moon, first produced Théâtre du Trident,
Quebec City, Canada, 2000.
4 Suzie Miller, Prima Face, first produced at Griffin Theatre, Sydney, Australia,
2019.
5 Suzan Lori-Parks, Top Dog/Underdog, first produced at the Public Theater,
New York, 2001.
6 Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, first produced at the National Theatre, London,
1998.
7 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, first produced Eureka Theatre Company,
San Francisco, 1991.
Chapter 2.9
1 Ian Dury is a superb lyricist, and his lyrics often feature superb wordplay, but
at the more earthy end of his writing you can find songs like Plaistow
Patricia, which begins with the immortal line: ‘Arseholes, bastards, fucking
cunts, and pricks!’
2 Edward Bond, Saved, first produced at the Royal Court, 1965.
3 Howard Brenton, Romans in Britain, first produced at the National Theatre, 1980
4 ‘Five people faint due to violence in National Theatre’s Cleansed’ article in The
Guardian 24 February 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/24/
five-people-faint-40-leave-violence-cleansed-national-theatre-sarah-kane
5 For example, John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, first produced in 1614,
and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, first produced between 1626 and 1633.
6 Grand Guignol was a popular form of cabaret entertainment in nineteenth-
century Paris, consisting of grotesque short plays featuring horror, violence
and sadism.
7 Respectively, Blasted by Sarah Kane (Royal Court, 1995); Lear by Edward
Bond (Royal Court, 1971); Snatch by Peter Rose (Soho Theatre at the
Pleasance, 1998); Jet of Blood by Antoine Artaud (written 1924, first
produced by the RSC in 1964).
NOTES 263
8 Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play, first produced at the New York Theatre
Workshop, 2018.
9 Vogel, How I Learned to Drive, pp. 100–3.
10 Tim Etchells, Step Off the Stage, Sheffield and Gent, April 2007. https://
timetchells.com/step-off-the-stage/
11 Prebble, Enron.
12 Paula Vogel quoted in an interview with Backstage.com, 2001. https://www.
backstage.com/magazine/article/paula-vogel-pulitzer-winner-playwright-
getting-way-42997/
13 Lisa Goldman, The No Rules Handbook for Writers (London: Oberon Books,
2012) p. 15.
Chapter 2.10
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)
Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.) p. 17.
2 Tim Crouch, The Author, (London: Oberon Books, 2009) p. 16.
3 Marvin Carlson, ‘Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance’
(Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, Volume 5, Issue 3, 2015)
pp. 577–95 (p. 587) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293328477_
Postdramatic_Theatre_and_Postdramatic_Performance
4 Carlson, ‘Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance’, p. 588.
5 Symbolism was a late-nineteenth-century movement in the arts using
symbol and metaphor to represent what the artist wanted to say. Maurice
Maeterlinck is perhaps the best-known symbolist playwright.
6 Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015) Section on Heidegger’s hammer p. 36.
7 The three unities usually attributed to Aristotle are unity of action, unity of
time and unity of place. However, these unities were established during late
eighteenth-century French neoclassicism; the only unity emphasized in the
Poetics is the unity of action, there is one brief mention of the unity of time,
and no mention of the unity of place.
8 Marianne van Kerkhoven, ‘The Burden of the Times’, an essay in Tat-Zeitung,
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Journal of the Theater am Turn, 1991) as cited in
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 83.
Chapter 2.11
1 The Iron Man was first produced by Graeae at the Greenwich & Docklands
International Festival in 2011.
264 NOTES
2 Bryony Lavery, Frozen, first produced at Birmingham Rep., 1998.
Fingersmiths production, 2014.
Chapter 3.1
1 This play eventually metamorphosed into a play called Skaville about the
National Front in Britain during the 1970s. It was first produced by Abacus
Arts at the Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, 1995.
2 A Night in Tunisia, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 1992.
3 Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture, 2005. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/
literature/2005/pinter/25621-harold-pinter-nobel-lecture-2005/
4 Philip Ridley quoted in Fifty Playwrights on their Craft Caroline Jester (ed.)
and Caridad Svich (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 117–18.
5 Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (New York: Touchstone, 2004) p. 6.
Originally published in 1942.
6 Sheila Yeger, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Oxford: Amber Lane Press,
1990) pp. 91–2.
7 Alice Birch in an interview with Daisy Bowie-Sell for Whatsonstage in 2016.
https://www.whatsonstage.com/edinburgh-theatre/news/alice-birch-
interview-revolt-edinburgh_41421.html
8 Stephen Sondheim quoted in an article by Erica Hansen in Deseret News,
2011. https://www.deseret.com/2011/2/3/20171426/stephen-sondheim-
brings-his-greatness-to-kingsbury-hall#features-logo
Chapter 3.2
1 The line in question came at a moment when an immigration officer
suspected they might have unearthed a mole working inside immigration
control at Heathrow, except she got a bit mixed up and said, ‘We’ve got a
mouse!’ Hilarious isn’t it! No. It’s not. I know. All I can say is, watch out for
those 2.00 am moments of inspiration when you think you’ve written a great
line – and get ready to cut it.
2 Thornton Wilder, A Preface for ‘Our Town’ in Thornton Wilder, Collected
Plays & Writings on Theater (New York: The Library of America, 2007)
pp. 657–9 (p. 658).
3 Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays (London: Penguin Books, 1962)
p. 21.
4 Duncan Macmillan, Lungs (London: Oberon Modern Plays, 2019) p. ix.
5 Courtesy of Adam Bock’s play, The Drunken City, first produced by Kitchen
Theatre Company, New York, 2005.
NOTES 265
6 Crimp. Attempts on Her Life, writer’s note before text begins on p. 1.
7 Barron, Dance Nation, writer’s note, p. 9.
8 Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., writer’s note, p. 19.
9 Shakespeare, William, A Winter’s Tale (London: Macmillan, 1963)
K. Deighton (ed.) 3.3.58, p. 45.
10 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 51.
11 Barron, Dance Nation, p. 56.
12 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods, p. 78.
13 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods, p. 74.
14 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods, p. 69.
15 Lee-Jones, Seven Methods, p. 74.
16 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 22.
17 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 22.
18 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 57.
19 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 62.
20 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 78.
21 Birch, Revolt, p. 59.
22 Birch, Revolt, p. 64.
23 Lopez, The Inheritance, p. 197.
24 Hickson, The Writer, pp. 37–56 (p. 48, 53, 56).
25 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968)
p. 15.
26 Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution, p. 223.
Chapter 3.3
1 Jonathan Larson worked for nine and a half years at the Moondance Diner
in New York while he wrote his musicals.
2 Shelagh Delaney worked as an usher at the Opera House, Manchester.
3 Piaf was first produced by the RSC at the Other Place, Stratford upon Avon,
1978. Other plays include, Dusa, Fish, Stars and Vi, (Edinburgh Festival,
1976), and Stanley (National Theatre, 1996).
4 James Baldwin, The Writers’ Chapbook (New York: Modern Library, 1999)
George Plimpton (ed.) p. 58.
5 Artistic directors run the companies and direct the plays they want to direct;
associate directors are – like the name suggests – associated with the
company and regularly direct plays there; freelance directors are directors
who are invited on an ad hoc basis to direct plays for the company.
266 NOTES
Chapter 3.4
1 ‘Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle:
Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after
you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish
between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquillity and outer
effectiveness become possible.’ Epictetus, The Art of Living (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1994) Sharon Lebell (ed.) p. 3.
2 Brené Brown, Rising Strong (London: Penguin Random House, 2015) p. 4.
3 Death of a Salesman was first produced at the Morosco Theatre, New York,
1949. I first saw it at the Oxford Playhouse in the late 1970s.
4 The Crucible was first produced at the Martin Beck Theatre, New York, 1953.
I toured in a university production of this play in Denmark in the early
1980s.
5 Resurrection Blues was first produced at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, in
2002. It was first produced in the UK at the Old Vic, London, 2006.
6 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 2013)
p. 112.
Chapter 3.5
1 April De Angelis, quoted in The Guardian, 13 December 2021. https://www.
theguardian.com/stage/2021/jan/13/uk-report-reveals-disgraceful-gender-
inequality-in-the-arts Full report available on the Sphinx Theatre website
https://sphinxtheatre.co.uk/new-women-in-theatre-survey-report/
NOTES 267
268
BIBLIOGRAPHY
269
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Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methuen,
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Epictetus (Dobbin, R., ed. and trans.), Discourses and Selected Writings, London:
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Epictetus (Lebell, S., ed.), The Art of Living, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994.
Esslin, M., The Theatre of the Absurd, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980.
Etchells, T., Certain Fragments: Texts and Writings on Performance, London:
Routledge, 2002.
Fountain, T., So You Want to be a Playwright, London: Nick Hern Books, 2007.
Fuchs, E., The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism,
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Furia, P., Ira Gershwin, The Art of the Lyricist, Oxford New York: Oxford
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Goldman, G., The No Rules Handbook for Writers, London: Oberon Books, 2012.
Gooch, S., Writing a Play, London: A&C Black, 1988.
Grace, F., Bayley C., Play Writing, London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Greig, N., Playwriting: A Practical Guide, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Hall, P., Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, London: Oberon Books, 2003.
Hartnoll, P. (ed.), The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, Oxford: Oxford
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Italie, J. C. van., The Playwright’s Workbook, New York: Applause Books, 1997.
Jeffreys, S., Playwriting, London: Nick Hern Books, 2019.
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Kerkhoven, M. van, ‘The Burden of the Times’, Frankfurt am Main TAT-Zeitung,
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Laurents, A., Original Story By Arthur Laurents, New York: Applause Theatre
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Lehmann, H-T., Postdramatic Theatre, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.
Lehmann, H-T., Jürs-Munby, K., Barnett, D., ‘Taking Stock and Looking
Forward: Postdramatic Theatre Symposium’, Contemporary Theatre Review,
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Mamet, D., Three Uses of the Knife, London: Methuen, 2007.
Miller, A., Timebends: A Life, London: Methuen, 1987.
Miller, A. (Roudané, M., intro.), The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller, London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015.
Miranda, L-M., McCarter, J., Hamilton: The Revolution, London: Little, Brown,
2016.
Nelson, R., Jones, D., Making Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy, London: Penguin Books, 1991.
Pinter, H., Four Plays: Introduction, London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
Plato (Rowe, C., ed.), The Republic, London: Penguin Books, 2012.
Plimpton, G. (ed.), The Paris Review Interviews: Playwrights at Work, London:
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Prebble, L., A Very Expensive Poison, London: Methuen, 2019.
270 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roberts, M., ‘Vanishing Acts: Sarah Kane’s Texts for Performance and Post-
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Romanska, M., The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Abingdon: Routledge,
2016.
Russell, B., The Conquest of Happiness, New York: Liveright Publishing
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Seneca, L. A. (Costa, C. D. N., trans.), On the Shortness of Life, London: 1997.
Sierz, A., In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, London: Faber and Faber, 2001.
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Sondheim, S., Look I Made a Hat, New York: Virgin Books, 2011.
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International, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2004.
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University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Tomlin, E., Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice
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Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2009.
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Vogel, P., Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays: Introduction, New York: Theatre
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Vogler, C., The Writer’s Journey, London: Pan Macmillan, 1999.
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Yeger, S., The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1990.
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Zeami, M. (Rimer, J. T., Masakazu, Y., trans.), On the Art of the No Drama: The
Major Treatises of Zeami, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 271
Plays and musicals referenced
Abbot, George; Rogers, Richard; Hart, Lorenz – The Boys from Syracuse
Aeschylus – Agamemnon
Artaud, Antoine – Jet of Blood
Baker, Annie – John; The Antipodes
Barron, Clare – Dance Nation
Bartlett, Mike – King Charles III
Bean, Richard – One Man, Two Guvnors
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot; Happy Days
Behan, Brendan – The Hostage
Birch, Alice – Anatomy of a Suicide; Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
Bock, Adam – The Drunken City
Bond, Edward – Saved; Lear
Bolt, Robert – A Man for All Seasons
Boswell, Laurence – Beauty and the Beast
Brenton, Howard – Romans in Britain
Buffini, Moira – Loveplay
Burke, Gregory – Black Watch
Butterworth, Jez – Jerusalem
Churchill, Caryl – A Number; Top Girls; Blue Heart
Corwin, John – Navy Pier
Crimp, Martin – Attempts on Her Life
Crouch, Tim – An Oak Tree; The Author
Delaney, Shelagh – A Taste of Honey
Éclair-Powell – Shed: Exploded View
Edgar, David – Nicholas Nickleby
Euripides – Medea; Cyclops
Ford, John – ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Frayn, Michael – Copenhagen
Friel, Brian – Dancing at Lughnasa; Faith Healer; Translations
Gems, Pam – Piaf; Stanley; Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi
Gill, Peter – The York Realist
Graham, James – This House
Hare, David – Amy’s View
Harris, Jeremy O – Slave Play
Harrison, Tony – The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
Harrower, David – Blackbird
Hickson, Ella – The Writer
Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden – An Octoroon
Johnson, Catherine; Andersson, Benny; Ulvaeus, Björn – Mamma Mia
Jonson, Ben – Bartholomew Fair; Volpone
Kane, Sarah – 4.48 Psychosis; Blasted; Cleansed
Kene, Arinze – Misty
Kirkwood, Lucy – Chimerica; Mosquitoes
272 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kron, Lisa; Tesori, Jeanine – Fun Home
Kushner, Tony – Angels in America
Kushner, Tony; Tesori, Jeanine – Caroline, or Change
Larson, Jonathan – Rent
Laurents, Arthur; Styne, Jule; Sondheim, Stephen – Gypsy
Lavery, Bryony – Frozen
Lee-Jones, Jasmine – Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner
Lepage, Robert – The Far Side of the Moon
Littlewood, Joan and Theatre Workshop – Oh What a Lovely War
Lloyd-Webber, Andrew ; Rice, Tim – Jesus Christ Superstar
Loesser, Frank; Swerling, Jo; Burrows, Abe – Guys & Dolls
Lopez, Matthew – The Inheritance
Lori-Parks, Suzan – Top Dog/Underdog
Love, Donja R. – One in Two
Macmillan, Duncan – People, Places and Things; Every Brilliant Thing (with
Jonny Donohoe); Lungs
Mamet, David – Oleanna
McCraney, Tarell Alvin – The Brothers Size
Miller, Arthur – A View from the Bridge; After the Fall; Resurrection Blues; Death
of a Salesman; The Crucible, After the Fall
Miller, Suzie – Prima Face
Miranda, Lin-Manuel – Hamilton
Morgan, Peter – The Audience
Payne, Nick – Constellations
Pinter, Harold – Betrayal
Porter, Cole; Spewack, Bella; Spewack, Samuel – Kiss Me Kate
Prebble, Lucy – Enron; A Very Expensive Poison
Puccini, Giacomo; Illica, Luigi, Giacosa, Giuseppe – La Bohème
Rogers & Hammerstein – Carousel
Rose, Peter – Snatch
Rwothomack, John – Far Gone
Seneca – Thyestes
Shaffer, Peter – Amadeus
Schnitzler, Arthur – La Ronde
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet; Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar; A Midsummer
Night’s Dream; Macbeth; King Lear; Love’s Labour’s Lost; A Winter’s Tale; Titus
Andronicus
Sirett, Paul – Reasons to be Cheerful; The Big Life; Bad Blood Blues; Rat Pack
Confidential; The Iron Man; Skaville; A Night in Tunisia; Worlds Apart
Sondheim, Stephen – Into the Woods
Sondheim, Stephen; Bernstein, Leonard; Laurents, Arthur – West Side Story
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex; Trackers
Stephens, Simon – Heisenberg
Strindberg, August – A Dream Play
Thomas, Dylan – Under Milk Wood
Thomas, Preston – Cambises
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273
tucker green, debbie – Random
Vogel, Paula – The Long Christmas Ride Home; Indecent; Baltimore Waltz; How I
Learned to Drive
Wade, Laura – The Watsons
Waller-Bridge, Phoebe – Fleabag
Walsh, Enda; Hansard, Glen; Irglová, Markéta – Once
Webster, John – The Duchess of Malfi
Wilder, Thornton – Our Town; The Long Christmas Dinner
Williams, Roy; Dyer, Clint – Death of England
Zeller, Florian – The Father
274 BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
275
Betrayal (Pinter) 73 submissions 190, 220, 221–2
Bharata Muni 62 writers’ groups 175, 218, 220, 228,
Big Life, The (Sirett) 23, 25, 35, 129 238
Birch, Alice 28, 33, 34, 41, 55, 59, 70, writers’ workshops 51, 175, 212,
78, 99–100, 113, 114, 115, 127, 220, 228, 242
142, 178, 179, 205, 207 Butterworth, Jez 142
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche)
253 n.1 Cambises (Preston) 98
Blackbird (Harrower) 110 Camus, Albert 16, 71
Black Watch (Burke) 96 Carley, John 258 n.6
Blasted (Kane) 90, 155 Caroline, or Change (Kushner, Tesori)
Bloom, Harold 25 92
Blue Heart (Churchill) 73 Carousel (Rogers, Hammerstein) 120
Bohème, La (Puccini, Giacosa, Illica, Castellucci, Cecil 130–1
Norton-Hale) 131, 262 n.26 challenges 243–4
Bolt, Robert 46 Chapman, George 24
Bond, Edward 150, 151, 179 character 81–101
Boswell, Lawrence 63, 92 acting technique-led 82–3
Boucicault, Dion 39, 48, 55–6, 77, 78 casting yourself 96–7
Boys from Syracuse, The (Abbot, commedia dell’arte 88–90
Rogers, Hart) 129 dominant model 82
breaking rules 153–6 doubling 97–8
Brecht, Bertolt 10, 41, 56, 94, 155, 165, Greek tragic hero 85–7
207, 253 n.6 inanimate objects 92
Brenton, Howard 150 modern character 95–6
British Union of Fascists 175 motivation 94–5
Brook, Peter 208 naming characters 98–100
Brothers Size, The (McCraney) 115, one-actor multiplicity 91
208 psychological truth 93–5
Brown, Brené 232–3 puppets 92–3
Büchner, Georg 69, 155 satyr 90–1, 259 n.6
Buffini, Moira 21, 73 stock characters 87–90
bunraku 93, n,260 thesis-antithesis-synthesis 84
Burke, Gregory 96 Charles III (Bartlett) 115
Bush Theatre 142 Chekhov, Anton 32, 36, 39, 65, 66
business 217–24 Chimerica (Kirkwood) 113
agents 224 chorus 42–4
competitions 185, 220, 229, 230, Churchill, Caryl 19, 21–2, 73, 261 n.7
231, 236, 253–4 n.8 Cleansed (Kane) 151
contracts 222 Cockpit Theatre 119
earning a living 217 Colchester Arts Centre 175
networking 220–1 collaboration 189–215
other mediums 223 in absentia 204–8
other sources of income 223–4 actors 201, 202
research 219–20 artistic director. See director
responsibility 219 associate director. See director
276 INDEX
auditions 198–9 Corwin, John 46
book (musical theatre) 211–14 costume 197
casting 198–9 Crimp, Martin 59, 67, 99, 114, 160,
choreographer 212 205, 208
composer 211–15 critics 42
costume 197 Crouch, Tim 54, 152, 163, 164, 179
co-writing 210 Crucible, The (Miller) 233
crew 202 Cyclops (Euripides) 90, 98
designer 195–8
devising 209 dance 42, 56, 68, 79, 87, 95, 112, 122,
dialogue 205–6 124–5, 137–9, 202, 212
director 192–5, 203, 266 n.5 Dance Nation (Barron) 49–50, 52, 77,
dramatic punctuation 205 95, 112, 113, 114, 115, 205, 206
dramaturg/literary manager Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel) 46
191–4, 196, 201 Darwin, Charles 31–2, 255 n.2
executive director 192–3, 199 De Angelis, April 242
fight director 202 Death of a Salesman (Miller) 233
front of house 203 Death of England (Williams, Dyer)
librettist 214–15 51, 148
lighting 198 Delaney, Shelagh 13, 180, 218–19,
lyrics 211–14 266 n.2
marketing 203 design 195–8
movement director 101 Diderot, Denis 16, 35, 37, 256 n.4
musical theatre 211–14 direct address 51–2
opera 214–15 director 192–5, 203, 266 n.5
press 203 Donohoe, Jonny 50
press night 202 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 74
production 202–3 dramatic structure. See structure
production manager 202 dramaturg 1, 46, 119, 130, 135, 141,
rehearsals 200–2 167, 169, 179, 185, 186–7,
stage directions 206–8 191–4, 196, 201, 218, 221–2,
stage manager 201 229–30, 233–4
sound 198 Dream Play, A (Strindberg) 70
technical rehearsal 202 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster)
technology 197 263 n.5
wardrobe 202 Dury, Ian 150, 263 n.1
writer’s note 204–5 DV8 138
Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 129 Dyer, Clint 51, 129, 148
competitions 185, 220, 229, 230, 231,
236, 253–4 n.8 Éclair-Powell, Phoebe 27, 112
Comte, Auguste 16, 31–2, 255 n.1 Edgar, David 46, 82–3, 177
Conquest of Happiness, The (Russell) Egri, Lajos 177
237–8 Elizabethan Theatre 37, 56, 107, 121,
Constellations (Payne) 33, 74, 75, 148 196
contracts 222 Eliot, T. S. 24–5
Copenhagen (Frayn) 148 Enron (Prebble) 40, 91, 121, 137, 154
INDEX 277
Epictetus 267 n.1 Frantic Assembly 138–9
epilogue 56–7 Frayn, Michael 148
Essex, the University of 175, 218 French neoclassicism 109, 264 n.7
Etchells, Tim 153–4 Friel, Brian 46, 50, 116
Euripides 43, 86–7, 90, 98, 150, 151, Frozen (Lavery) 171
179 Fuchs, Elinor 9
Eustis, Oscar 127 Fun Home (Korn, Tesori) 46
Every Brilliant Thing (Macmillan,
Donohoe) 50 Gecko 138
Everyman (Anonymous) 38 Gems, Pam 219
Existentialism 16–17 Genet, Jean 17, 28
Gershwin, George 126
Faith Healer (Friel) 50 Gershwin, Ira 126, 129
Far Gone (Rwothomack) 135–7 Gill, Peter 110
Far Side of the Moon, The (Lepage) Goddard, Ben 262 n.24
148 Gogol, Nikolai 32
Father, The (Zeller) 70 Goldman, Lisa 155
Fingersmiths 171 Goldoni, Carlo 53
First Night (Forced Entertainment) Gormenghast (Peake) 31
149 Graeae Theatre Company 141, 169
Footsbarn Theatre 92 Graham, James 20
Forced Entertainment 92, 149 Grand Guignol 152, 263 n.6
Forster, E. M. 39–40, 69 Granville-Barker, Harley 32
fourth wall 35–57 Greek theatre
access 169 chorus 42–4
aside 47–8 City Dionysia 253
audience 36–7 comedy 43, 68
audience participation 52–4 diction 106–7
demolition 36–7 fatal flaw (hamartia) 85
direct address 51–2 movement 137
epilogue 56–7 music 120
exposed stage 55–6 parabasis 43, 68
foundations 35–6 prologue 37
induction 41–2 satyr play 90–1
innovation 36 shock 150
monologue 50–1 tragedy 15–16, 60, 85, 106, 120,
musical theatre 122 150
narrator 45–7 tragic hero 85–7
prologue 37–41 unities 264 n.7
ubiquity of 36 Guardian 116, 226, 242
Fleabag (Waller-Bridge) 48, Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 74
257 n.26 Gupta, Tanika 28
Fletcher, John 179 Guys & Dolls (Loesser, Swerling,
Ford, John 151 Burrows) 23, 120
Fosse, Jon 160 Gypsy (Laurents, Sondheim, Styne)
4.48 Psychosis (Kane) 67, 118, 208 123–4, 125, 134
278 INDEX
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 10, 47, 49, 61, jo-ha-kyū 62–3, 258 n.6
83, 93, 105 John (Baker) 52
Happy Days (Beckett) 75–6 Johnson, Catherine 133
Hamilton (Miranda) 27, 45, 125, Jonson, Ben 41–2, 56, 92, 103–4, 141,
127–8 146, 179
Hammerstein II, Oscar 134 Jordan, Anna 139
Hansberry, Lorraine 27 Joseph, Paul 25, 129
Hare, David 235 Joyal, Mark 98–9
Harrison, Tony 91 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 47, 165
Harris, Jeremy O., 152–3
Harris, Zinnie 21 Kane, Sarah 15, 19, 28, 59, 67, 90, 117,
Harrower, David 110 151, 152, 155, 160, 179, 208,
Havel, Václav 16 222
Hedley, Philip 120, 129 Kareem, Moji 135
Heidegger, Martin 165–6 Kene, Arinze 51
Hickson, Ella 33, 53, 79, 97, 100, 142, Kerkhoven, Marianne van 167
179, 207 King Lear (Shakespeare) 142, 143–6,
Hippocrates 253 n.7 147
Hooke, Robert 24 Kirkwood, Lucy 113, 114
Horace 25, 103 Kiss Me Kate (Spewack, Porter,
Hostage, The (Behan) 13 Spewack) 129
Howards End (Forster) 69 Korn, Lisa 46
How I Learned to Drive (Vogel) 28, Kushner, Tony 92, 148, 222, 229
44, 78, 96, 116, 153 Kyd, Thomas 25
INDEX 279
Lee-Jones, Jasmine 50, 57, 77, 112, McCraney, Tarell Alvin 115, 208
115, 206 Medea (Euripides) 86–7
Lehman Trilogy, The 33 Medieval English drama 88
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 159–60 melodrama 39, 48, 52, 56, 78, 115, 154
Lepage, Robert 148 Melvin, Murray 13
letter to the future 245 mental health 225–39
literary manager. See dramaturg advice 238–9
Littlewood, Joan 13, 180 age 227
Litvinenko, Alexander 44 anxiety 231–2
Litvinenko, Marina 43–4 collaboration (when it goes
Live Theatre 74 wrong) 233–4
Lloyd-Webber, Andrew 45 confidence 229–30
London Contemporary Dance critics 235
Theatre 138 endurance 237, 238
London Dungeon 152 exposure 231–2
London Playwrights’ Workshop/Blog family 227
224 general 226–7
Long Christmas Dinner, The (Wilder) giving up 237–8
73 health conditions 227–8
Long Christmas Ride Home, The humiliation 236
(Vogel) 23, 93, 121 imposter syndrome 228–9
Lopez, Matthew, 39–40, 69, 96–7, jealously 236–7
148, 207 paranoia 230–1
Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien) 31 press night 229–30, 235
Lori-Parks, Suzan 148 pressure 230
Love, Donja R. 40, 100 rejection 233
Loveplay (Buffini) 72 reviews 235, 237
Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) shame 225, 235
25, 129 star rating 235, 238
Lungs (Macmillan) 196–7 vulnerability (as courage) 232–3
Lush Life (Sirett) 74, 103, 111, 150 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
(Shakespeare) 56–7, 92
Machiavelli, Niccolò 16 Miller, Arthur 23, 27, 70, 86, 228, 229,
Macmillan, Duncan 39, 50, 98, 113, 233
196–7, 207–8 Miller, Suzie 148
Mamet, David 33 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 45, 125, 127–8,
Mamma Mia (Johnson, Andersson, 129, 133–4, 213
Ulvaeus) 133 Misty (Kene) 51
Man for All Seasons, A (Bolt) 46 monologue 50–1
Manhattan Theatre Club 122 Montaigne, Michel de 24, 25
manifestos Morgan, Abi 139
Sirett, Paul 14 Morgan, Peter 20
Theatre Workshop 13 Moscow Arts Theatre 36
Marlowe, Christopher 25 Moseley, Oswald 175
mask 88–90 Mosquitoes (Kirkwood) 114
Massini, Stefano 33 movement. See physical theatre
280 INDEX
Muir-Smith, Emma 130, 131–2 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 11, 60–2,
musicals 119–30 150, 151, 253–4 n.8
adaptations 130 Oh What a Lovely War (Theatre
book writer 122–30 Workshop) 13
composer 123–30 Oleanna (Mamet) 33
Elizabethan 120–1 Once (Walsh, Hansard, Irglová) 72
Greek 120 One in Two (Love) 40, 100
juke-box musicals 133 One Man, Two Guvnors (Bean) 53
librettist 127. See also opera opera 127, 130–3
lyricist 123–30 Origin of the Species (Darwin) 31–2
Shakespeare 129 Ostrovsky, Alexander 32
Othello (Shakespeare) 49
Naked Productions 141 Our Town (Wilder) 23, 45–6, 47, 72,
narrator 45–7 196
National Theatre 33, 142, 143, 151, 222 Oxford Playhouse 31
Naturalism 31–4
design 33 pantomime 54, 187
as a device 31 parabasis 43, 68
language 33–4 Parker, Cornelia 27
options 33–4 Payne, Nick 33, 74, 75, 148
predominance of 32 Peake, Mervyn 31
realism and naturalism 31–2 Peggy Ramsey Foundation 223
as theatricality 33 People, Places & Things (Macmillan)
Nā.t yaśāstra (Bharata Muni) 62, 137 39, 98, 207–8
Navy Pier (Corwin) 46 Pericles (Shakespeare) 13
New Art of Writing Plays, The (de Philocles 253–4 n.8
Vega) 63 physical theatre 135–9, 147, 154, 166,
Newton, Sir Isaac 24, n255 202, 243
New Wolsey Theatre 262 n.24 Piaf (Gems) 219
Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens/Edgar) 46 Pinter, Harold 17, 19, 24, 73, 83, 97,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 253 n.1 176
Night in Tunisia, A (Sirett) 175 Plater, Alan 177
Norman, Pickles (Wayne) 171 Plautus 87
Norton, Thomas 25 Playwriting (Jeffreys) 259 n.32
No Rules Handbook for Writers, The Poetics (Aristotle) 15–16, 60–2, 106–7
(Goldman) 155 Positivism 16, 31–2
Nottage, Lynn 27 postdramatic plays 159–67
0.19 per cent 19–22, 232 audience 162–4
Number, A (Churchill) 19, 21–2 background 159–60
chaos 167
Oak Tree, An (Crouch) 54 logic 166
Octoroon, An (Jacobs-Jenkins) 38, 41, magic 166–7
48, 55–6, 70, 77–8, 96, 115–16, new 167
207 performer 162
Octoroon, The (Boucicault) 39, 48, revolution 166–7
70, 77 space 164–5
INDEX 281
symbol 165–6 Sackville, Thomas 25
time 164 scene structure 62–7
words 161–2 elements 67
Postdramatic Theatre (Lehmann) 160 internal dynamics 65
Power, Ben 33 narrative-driven drama 64–5
Prebble, Lucy 15, 40, 43–4, 52, 91, 93, pace 65–6
121, 137, 154, 179, tone 66
Preston, Thomas 98 Seagull, The (Chekhov) 39
Prima Face (Miller) 148 Sealey, Jenny 141, 169
Prior, Patrick 195, 233 Schnitzler, Arthur 71
process. See under writing Seneca 11, 16, 24, 25, 76, 150, 162
prologue 37–41 Servant of Two Masters, A 53
provocations 156–7 Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner
Public Theatre, New York 127 (Lee-Jones) 50, 57, 77, 112,
Puccini, Giacomo 131, 133, 262 n.26 115, 206
punctuation 109, 111, 113–14, 205 Shaffer, Peter 45
Shakespeare, William 10, 13, 24–6,
Ramsey, Margaret 182 28, 38, 47–9, 52, 56–7, 59, 61,
Random (tucker green) 91, 98 76, 81, 83, 92, 93–5, 104–10,
Rat Pack Confidential (Sirett) 53 127–8, 129, 142–7, 151, 165,
Ravenhill, Mark 139, 151 179, 206, 229
Reasons to be Cheerful (Sirett) 35, Shaw, George Bernard 32
159, 165, 169, 170, 172 Shed: Exploded View (Éclair-Powell)
reasons to be a playwright 247–52 27, 112
Rent (Larson) 133–4, 218, 262 n.26 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2
Resurrection Blues (Miller) 233 shock 149–53
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Birch) Singin’ in the Rain (Comden, Green)
41, 55, 78, 99–100, 113, 115, 55
178, 205, 207 Sirett, Paul 1, 7, 13–15, 20, 23, 25, 28,
Rice, Tim 45 31, 35, 53, 59, 74, 81, 103, 111,
Ridley, Philip 176 119–20, 129, 137, 141, 149–50,
Roberts, Max 74 159, 165, 169, 170, 172, 175–6,
Rogers, Richard 134 189–90, 217–18, 225–6, 233,
Romans in Britain, The (Brenton) 150 235, 237, 265 n.1
Romanticism 31 Skin of Our Teeth, The (Wilder) 27
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 38 Slave Play (Harris) 152–3
Ronde, La (Schnitzler) 71 Soho Theatre 15, 119, 218
Rowe, Peter 262 n.24 soliloquy 48–50
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art 1 Sondheim, Stephen 125, 126, 128,
Royal Court Theatre 70, 122, 132, 129, 134
142, 151, 152, 164, 179, 222, Sophocles 11, 28, 43, 60–2, 91, 98,
228, 230, 234, 240, 243, 246 150, 151, 155, 179, 253–4 n.8
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Sound of One Hand Clapping, The
142, 233 (Yeger) 177
Russell, Bertrand 237–8 Spanish Golden Age 109, 196
Rwothomack, John 135–7 Sphinx Theatre 242
282 INDEX
stage directions 33, 39, 99, 100, 113, Teare, Jeff 175, 189–90
115, 121, 135–6, 137, 196, 204, Tesori, Jeanine 46, 92
206–8, 221, 243 Theatre Deli 137
Stanislavski, Konstantin 32, 35–6, 49, Theatre Royal Stratford East 13, 23,
82–3, 101 25, 119, 120, 141, 175, 180, 189,
Strindberg, August 70 195, 218
structure 59–80 Theatre Workshop 13, 180
beginning-middle-end 60–3 Theophrastus 88
borrowed 69–70 Thespis 155
branching 74 This House (Graham) 20
daisy-chain 72–3 Thomas, Polly 141
Dance Nation (Barron) 77 Timebends (Miller) 233
defying expectation 71–2 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford) n263
fragments 69 Titus Alone (Peake) 31
Greek comedy 68 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare)
How I Learned to Drive (Vogel) 78 151
Indecent (Vogel) 78–9 Top Dog/Underdog (Lori-Parks)
inside the mind 70–1 148
Kishōtenketsu (no conflict) 73 Top Girls (Churchill) 73
meandering 73 Toussaint Buck, Akeim 135
multiple POV 72 Toynbee Studios 149
music 76–7 Trackers (Sophocles) 91, 98
Octoroon, An 77–8 Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, The
Oedipus Rex template 60–2 (Harrison) 91
parallel 74 Translations (Friel) 116
postdramatic 76 Traverse 142
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Trotsky, Leon n253
(Birch) 78 Truby, John n259
scenes 63–7. See also scene tucker green, debbie 21, 33, 91, 98,
structure 112, 116–17, 127
science (as structure) 74–5 Turgenev, Ivan 32
Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Tuskegee Syphilis Study 35
Jenner (Lee-Jones) 77
Sisyphean (circular) 71 Ultz 13
story 80 Under Milk Wood (Thomas) 72,
time 73 258 n.19
wheel 72
Writer, The (Hickson) 79 Vega, Lope de 63, 146
submissions 190, 220, 221–2 Very Expensive Poison, A (Prebble)
sub-plot 26, 142, 143–7 43–4, 93
symbolism 165, 264 n.5 A View from the Bridge (Miller) 23
Vogel, Paula 15, 23–4, 27, 28, 41, 44,
Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare) 59, 76, 78–9, 93, 95–6, 97–8,
129 116, 121, 147, 153, 154,
Taste of Honey, A (Delaney) 13, 180, 155–6
218–19 Volpone (Jonson) 56, 92
INDEX 283
Wade, Laura 67, 97 ideas 181
Wagner, Richard 253 n.1 making art 9–11
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 71 manifestos 13–14
Waller-Bridge, Phoebe 48 master and apprentice 27
Waters, Steve 53 new wave 242
Watsons, The (Wade) 67, 97 0.19 per cent 19–22, 232
Webster, John 151 priorities 15
Wertenbaker, Timberlake 63 process 177–9
West Side Story (Laurents, Sondheim, philosophy 16
Bernstein) 66, 119–20, 123, precipitateness versus
124, 125, 129 perfectionism 182
Wilder, Thornton 9–10, 23, 27, 28, procrastination 182
45–6, 47, 73, 86–7, 93, 196 production 187
Williams, Roy 51, 148 questions for the second draft
Williams, Tennessee 27 183–5
Wilson, August 27 reasons to write 7–8
Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) 206 rejection 187
Women in Theatre Report (Sphinx rejection letters 186
Theatre) 242 re-writing 183, 187
Worlds Apart (Sirett) re-writing after rejection 185–6
Woyzeck (Büchner) 69 re-writing after feedback 186–7
Writer, The (Hickson) 53, 79, 100, 207 stealing 24–5
Writers Guild of Great Britain study 179–80
(WGGB) 200, 222, 223, 234, tipping point 187
238 vision 16–17, 147, 152, 181
writers’ groups 175, 218, 220, 228, 238 voice 19–22, 27, 46
writers’ workshops 51, 175, 212, 220,
228, 242 Yeger, Shelia 177
writing York Realist, The (Gill) 110
being selfish 8 Yosiphon, Lilac 135
business. See under business
challenges 243–4 Zeami Motokiyo 62–3
dialectical process 178 Zeller, Florian 70
future 241–4 Zola, Emile 32, 255 n.3
284 INDEX